


The Weighing of the Heart

by divingforstones



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Witness Protection, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-12 04:03:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 60,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12950898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/pseuds/divingforstones
Summary: James tries to blunt down his anger, in the urgency of explaining it to Innocent so that she’ll listen. Because something is very wrong here. Lewis wouldn’t just go. Without a word to — anyone. There’s no way he would just up and leave. And one thing James knows, from years of being Lewis’ backup, is that Lewis wouldn’t agree to this for his own personal safety.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As I think a lot of us experience, for one reason or another, sometimes the writing deserts you at the times when you really most need to be able to write! Thank you so much to ComplicatedLight for her understanding in showing me a way past that, that let me get back to deriving pure pleasure from writing again, and also get right back to this particular fic. 
> 
> Thanks to ComplicatedLight and to Jackie Thomas for so much advice, support, encouragement and discussion throughout, which made so much difference to this fic. 
> 
> Also thank you to anyone around this very lovely fandom who I bumped into in a comments section over the last couple of years, when they'd left lovely comments on older works, that often gave me really timely boosts to keep at writing. It was very much appreciated and helped so much.
> 
> This is a 60k, seven-chapter fic, which is finished - bar the inevitable, incessant little bits and pieces of fine-tuning! -so it should be posted at regular intervals.
> 
> It starts weeks after Season 6 ends, when we still have Sergeant Hathaway, so it goes off on its own merry slashy little canon-divergent way from there...

“So,” Lewis says, setting down his pint glass. “We have a dead professor on our hands and a right weekend in store, and then you go and—” He stops, shaking his head. He’s not watching James. He’s casting his long-suffering look out of the window at the narrow street.

James eyes the pint glass suspiciously. It’s landed on the table like a judge’s gavel, and he knows what that sound heralds. He knows that whatever casual remark follows it’ll never be half as casual as it seems. Lewis is embarking on one of his quests.

“Sir?” He should probably, in light of this morning, be more alarmed. He should probably marshall his defences.

But they’re half a pint into the evening already. They've fairly quickly divested themselves of the signatures of the working week. James’s suit jacket is on the back of his chair. Lewis is tie-less and has rolled back his shirt sleeves. This pub, with its old cloudy-glass windows, is one of James’ favorites. And lazy shafts of November sunlight have found their way in, reaching just past their table. The sun is warm through the window, in a way it wouldn’t be if they were directly in its path.

And this, James knows, is him forgiven. Although he’s still not convinced there’s anything he’d needed to seek forgiveness for. But he’s willing to chalk this morning up to make the ledger a bit less lopsided. Past sins.

Lewis glances back at him. He's amused now, more than anything else, James gauges from the loose twist of his mouth. “You,” he says, “go and crack the case on the basis of an inscription on a giant bloody stone beetle.”

“Doctor Hobson was very pleased,” James defends himself. “She said no-one had ever paid so much attention to the archaeological origins of the blunt object before. And that if only everyone else took a leaf out of my book she’d never have to go beyond preliminary findings again.”

Although she’d also called him Indiana Jones and seemed far more amused than James had personally thought the situation had warranted.

“You went to tell her, did you? She would be pleased. She’d something or other on this weekend, and you’ve just rescued her from spending it in the morgue. That’s the whole point, though, Sergeant. How did you know that the paperweight used to bash Moore’s head in didn’t belong to his own collection of beetle paperweights? It looked ancient enough.”

“They really weren’t happy about you calling them paperweights, were they, sir?”

Lewis dismisses this with a wave of the hand, affording it as little attention as he had throughout the days preceding this. James had known they were in for another round of Lewis versus The Academics as soon as the Egyptology’s department secretary had informed them that Professor Alweiss could not _possibly_ be disturbed at her seminar. And Lewis had asserted that a lecture on reincarnation beliefs and funerary rites around 3000BC could hardly be a matter of— well, life and death now, could it? Which had pretty much set the tone for what was to follow.

“He was a scarab beetle. Our murder weapon stone beetle.” _Scarabaeus_ _sacer_ , James adds silently. Sometimes it’s best to add the latin silently. “The ancient Egyptians revered them and made all sorts of artwork and seals. You could’ve got ones with an inscription saying ‘Inspector Lewis’ in hieroglyphics essentially.”

“If I’d been a Pharaoh. It’d save writing the Christmas cards, I suppose.”

“But from the size of our stone beetle it’d have to have been a funerary heart scarab.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Lewis says, patience clearly on display. “And…”

“Oh. Well. So they were bigger, very particular, stone sculptures depicting the scarab beetle and they’d place them over the heart when a mummy was wrapped—to prevent it from confessing all its secrets during the Weighing of the Heart ceremony. They believed the heart knew everything—it was the seat of all knowledge and it held the mind and soul. The gods of the underworld would remove the heart, weigh it against a feather of truth on the scales, and see how heavy it was with misdeeds. To see if the deceased should be let into the Afterlife. And the answers to the ritualised questions they were going to ask the deceased, during the ceremony, were carved into the base of the funerary heart scarab.”

“Like a cheat sheet,” Lewis says, nodding.

“Yes,” says James, amused. “So it should have been quite particular glyphs that were inscribed on it. That was all.”

“Which was why, first thing this morning, you’d gone and turned your phone into…” Lewis gestures at him. The look Lewis had given him, when James had casually shown him his phone screen, is one James will treasure for a long time to come.

“It’s just an app — it transposes selections of glyphs over your onscreen keyboard so you can type in hieroglyphs,” he says, straight-faced. Lewis is not quite sure enough to dispute this. He’s eyeing James again now like he still suspects him of black magic. Except James knows Lewis tends to get that expression whenever the word ‘app’ is used in his presence.

His speechlessness at the time had made James murmur obligingly, “What fresh hell can this be, eh, sir?” Part of Lewis’ despair, James knows, is based on having the same phone. He expects that any day now, his will start to behave like his sergeant’s of its own accord. James likes to nurture this mistrust with remarks about syncing and bluetooth. Hieroglyphics had been entirely beyond his ability to resist.

“Temporarily transposes. I’m going to take as read that you’ve transformed it back to normal by Monday morning. You’ll be getting no replies from me if you start texting me in loaves and fishes and whatnot.”

He’d left James to it, though, poking around happily, refamiliarising himself with glyphs, with little more than the _are_ _we_ _sure_ _about_ _this_ _now_ , _Sergeant_ , initial-warning look. And a pile of witness statements dropped on James’ desk, to reign his flights of fancy back in, while Lewis went back to call on Moore’s very new widow. Partly prompted, James knew full well, by pure empathy on Lewis’ part, rather than concrete hopes of her having recalled anything else of use.

As a child, James had become wonderfully lost in the world of this odd language, with its almost-permission to pair things in new ways to say things that hadn’t been said before. He’d briefly attempted to keep a diary using glyphs. It had proved both less indecipherable to Nell than he’d hoped and very time-consuming.

“No, sir,” he agrees. “You’re safe enough. They definitely don’t have a glyph for depicting whatnot.”

Lewis gifts him another look. James gives in.

“It was more of a lucky guess. I know roughly what the Weighing of the Heart Spell looks like. Just from familiarisation, I suppose. ‘Do not stand as a witness against me’,” he quotes. And then, at Lewis’ eyebrow, “So a couple of the glyphs didn’t look like they had any business being there. They have to be really precise answers. Get one wrong and you fail the ceremony and cease to exist.”

“Come to think of it; it wouldn’t be the worst idea if the Crown Prosecution Service did things this way. With the weighing scales. Save a hell of a lot of paperwork preparing those files. Do away with the need for prisons when someone gets the answers wrong in court.”

James considers him. “Actually, sir, because of the levels of illiteracy at the time, sometimes the priests would read the spell to an actual scarab beetle, kill it, mummify it, and placed in the ear of the deceased, so it could whisper the answers to him.”

Lewis’ mouth flattens in distaste. James nods at him, in commiserating fashion, rueful-cheerful, and concentrates on his pint. After a moment Lewis’ hand comes up, and he scratches vigorously behind his left ear. James hides his grin in his glass and leans back, sinking into the familiarity of this, enjoying the press of the bar of the chair across his back. Sometimes, sitting with Lewis at a pub table, talking and not talking, reminds him curiously of rowing.

“So they were buried with insects in their ears.”

“Just the one. And it was more like being buried with the spirit of a highly revered icon.”

“No getting away from the fact they’d had a dead beetle shoved in an orifice, though, is there?”

“No, sir. No getting away from that.” Tricky to get away from anything when Lewis starts honing in on it. Like whatever he’s doing now; slowly moving in on a reconstruction of James’ thinking this morning. James knows this is what Lewis is doing as surely as any suspect, lulled by Lewis into letting down their guard in an interview room, doesn’t. What he doesn’t know yet is if the end destination here is what had happened, in the end, in Professor Kemp’s study when the case had messily imploded. James had thought that was already safely locked and bolted, out of sight, in the ‘never-mention’ vault.

Lewis taps a finger against his pint glass, thoughtful. “For a man who displays unreasonable levels of dislike towards a simple spider…you seem to have quite the interest in beetles.”

“Not unreasonable. Perfectly well-founded. And I’d have no difficulty with a spider preserved as an artefact, or in some noteworthy wildlife photograph, it’s the movement that—” James suppresses a shudder. Not half effectively enough, if Lewis’ grin is anything to go by. Lewis has gained revenge for the ghostly ear beetle already. “And I don’t know much about them. I’d just read something recently about scarabs.”

“Spend much of your spare time reading about beetles, do you?”

James composes his expression into one of interested enquiry. “Doesn’t everyone, sir? Given the opportunity?”

Lewis leans forward, elbows set on the table. “Alright. Just for that. Get your notebook out.”

“It was an article in a magazine in a waiting room,” James admits, not making any move to obey.

“Yes, James. But—you read it?”

“It was there.”

“Cereal packets,” says Lewis, categorising this behaviour to his own satisfaction. “Our Lyn used to do that. Bet you sat there reading the back of them at breakfast if you hadn’t got anything else to read.”

James bites back another ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ that’s bound to come out sounding a lot sharper than Lewis would find warranted, at the decidedly mixed blessing of being compared to Lewis’ Lyn.

“What the hell were you waiting to have done anyway? Mummification?”

“Dental hygienist,” says James, neatly. That succeeds in shutting Lewis up for a moment. Or at least reduces the volume down to muttering into his pint.

It had been a National Geographic. It was the colours that had drawn him in. Some of the beetles had a metallic sheen in such improbable colours that James still lacks the words to describe them in his head. Iridescent. Luminescent. They’d glowed straight off the page, almost adding another dimension.

“I followed it up online when I got home. It was the weekend,” he explains, in answer to Lewis’ expression. That does nothing to appease the look.

“You just—you get on the trail of something, and there’s no stopping you, is there? You get the bit between your teeth...”

James glances quickly at him. This is bigger than today then. This is creeping uncomfortably close to The Hunting of the Snark and the way the books and obsessive private quests on that case had prompted Lewis to look at James. What it had prompted Lewis to say to him. To think about him.

He hasn’t worked out yet why Lewis has taken to dropping blunt truths on him at blunt moments, these past months. Sometimes between them on pub tables. But whatever’s been needling at him about James, they seem to be firmly back on the trail of it again. And he wishes sometimes he was less aware of Lewis’ interrogation dance. He’s equal parts intrigued, restless, and yet not wanting Lewis to stop.

“You see,” says Lewis, his look assessing. “I know how I finally got onto realising Kemp was our prime suspect this morning. From what Moore’s wife said to me. What I’m not so clear about is how you got there. So you took—”

“Borrowed.”

“—took our supposedly priceless murder-weapon stone beetle off for a second opinion to Moore’s academic-next-door.”

“Well. I was sure it wasn’t actually hugely historic and valuable when I took it to show Professor Alweiss.” Fairly sure.

“And d’you think, in retrospect, it would’ve better if you’d let Innocent in on your thinking before she got the impression you’d signed out a priceless artefact from the evidence room and taken it off somewhere on the backseat of your car?”

Lewis hadn’t cared about the kidnapping of the priceless artefact bit. That part had entertained him. It was where James’ trail of detecting had led him from there. James straightens up a little in his chair, crossing his legs in an effort to shrug this off. “A minor hiccup, sir. She’s recovered now that we’ve tied this up so nicely for her. Or at least — by the time Monday morning comes around I’m sure she’ll have gained a wider perspective.”

Lewis continues to look at him. _In_ _your_ _own_ _good_ _time_ , _Sergeant_ , says that look.

James grimaces. “Professor Alweiss took one look at it and said Professor Moore would never have let that cross his threshold.” Without intending to, he finds himself saying it in the querulous manner Professor Alweiss had used. “Let alone anywhere in the vicinity of his collection.”

Lewis gives a sudden chuckle. “Nothing,” he says, amused, “reminded me of someone, that’s all.”

“Put it this way, sir; Professor Moore was so exercised over the forgery of ancient artefacts that he’d set up a website evaluating the authenticity of the websites that authenticate ancient artefacts.”

Lewis heaves a sigh. “Sometimes,” he says, to no-one in particular, “I’m very sorry I ask. So you just put all that together in your head with the email where—”

“Where Kemp had arranged to meet with Moore to show him an interesting find from a recent trip,” James completes for him, hurriedly. Before Lewis can go any further along the chain of events to what James had done next. It had been a bit of a leap to match that one, newly shining bright, inconsistency of the funerary scarab’s origins with that causal email. Kemp wasn’t even in the Egyptology department, and he’d only been included in interviews on the basis of trying to get a picture of Moore’s final movements. But, as so often happened, these things came down to Lewis far more than Lewis ever realised. “You’d said he seemed cagey when we interviewed him yesterday. And he was claiming the meeting never happened.”

Lewis gives him a half-nod. James hides his relief in his glass; Lewis is leaving it there. Right before they get to what had then happened on James’ solo return to Kemp’s study.

It had been a bit hairy, James can admit now. If only within the safety of Lewis having finally settled down in the aftermath, and the privacy of James’ own head.

He still isn’t sure how he’d managed to get himself so thoroughly trapped. He’d crouched down for an instant to peer into the corner display case behind Kemp’s desk, to see if it had shown any signs of any seven-inch stone heart scarab beetles recently removed. Then he’d heard the sound of a tiny click as he’d straightened up. And there was Kemp, knife blade extended, shining, inches from James’ own heart.

Kemp was hardly a mass murderer. Just a man twisted up in some sort of sorrily-mundane grudge. There was no real reason, James had told himself, as he’d slowly raised his hands, to think that he’d really—

James’ phone had started ringing. Kemp had slid his other hand into James’ pocket, extracted it while James attempted not to flinch, and silenced it. It’d immediately started up again. Kemp hadn’t taken his eyes off James as he’d switched it off.

The wash of relief, when he’d heard the hurried footsteps on the stairs, had almost made James lose his footing. And then Lewis had shouldered the door open; James’ own personal knight in shirtsleeves.

He appeared to have arrived in a such a hurry that he’d failed to don his jacket when he’d left the car.

Kemp’s hand hadn’t wavered. Not when the door was shoved open again, behind Lewis, so that it slammed against the wall. Not when Lewis had quickly, so quickly, halted the matching pair of uniforms in their tracks with an outstretched arm. Not until Lewis had said, “Put that down.” In a tone of voice that had made both Kemp and James glance at him, involuntarily. James really hadn't meant to take his eyes off the suspect. But Lewis’ voice had been — He hadn’t sounded like Lewis at all and he’d also looked a bit odd, a bit dishevelled, and James had gazed a fraction too long, so that as he’d dragged his focus back to Kemp, Kemp had seemed, for one long moment, poised at the top of a roller coaster, holding back only for momentum to drive the lunge. Instead, he’d dropped the knife, blade still shining, clattering right onto the wooden floor at James’ feet.

James had lowered his arms but hadn’t moved otherwise from his corner.

Not as Lewis told the PCs to “ _Cuff him_.” Nor as Kemp was bundled out of the door, and the sound of tramping feet had tried to fill the void of silence once more. Lewis had held up a hand to signal James was to stay where he was. He’d pulled a glove from his pocket as he approached, snapped it on, and crouched down at James’ feet to pick up the knife. And he’d driven the blade back into the handle with that innocuous little click. That still sounded overly loud. As if it were live ammunition after all.

When he’d stood, slowly, upright he’d looked almost grey. James had reached forward, uselessly, for his arm. But Lewis had leaned the hand with the knife on the desk, heavily, instead, slipping out of his grasp.

It had been such a visible struggle of a moment, such an odd stop from Lewis, that James’ heart had paused a beat right along with him in sympathy.

Then Lewis’ face had set in some complicated way. Like he was resigning himself to something, James thought now, afterwards, struggling to recapture it after the event. “This,” he’d said, gesturing at James, “stops right now.”

“Yes, sir,” James had agreed, his eyes on the knife, and his own hand feeling in his pocket for an evidence bag. He’d wanted only to remove that look from Lewis’ face. He could establish exactly what ‘this’ was later. Lewis hadn't looked entirely like he was hearing him anyway. But that had been James’ second big mistake of the morning. Lewis had caught his tone.

“No. James, don’t you—look at me, James—don’t you _yes, sir_ me on this. You need to stop this.”

James had known, he really had known, it was completely the wrong thing to say, but he genuinely—“Stop what?” he’d asked.

Lewis had stared at him until he’d seemed to see the question was genuine. “This,” he’d said at last, but gently now. “All of this. This going off on your own after suspects and putting yourself in harm’s way.”

“But I don’t—” He’d come to a halt at Lewis’ expression.

“Tell me you’ll stop this.”

“Okay.”

“You promise now? Even if one of your ideas looks like it’s suddenly turning into something.”

James had nodded. James would pretty much promise anything when Lewis looked at him like that. He might not remember afterwards, anything but the look, but he’d promise. “Okay,” he’d conceded. “I won’t. Go off without you.”

“Doesn’t have to be me. Even if I’m not around. Otherwise, you do this one more time, and I’ll have to put in a transfer request for you.”

James had let that wash right over his head, the sheer unlikelihood of it. A transfer request? Because he’d gone ahead questioning a suspect without waiting for backup? He’d still been more concerned with gently rubbing away the remnants of that look from Lewis. “I did send you a text—”

That had turned out to be very much the wrong thing to say too. Lewis had closed his eyes briefly and breathed through his nose. “You sent me a text,” he’d repeated.

“It was a hunch. I just wanted to check it out before—”

“And then your not-so-finely-tuned instincts told you it’d be a good idea to ask a few further questions, so you sent a further—text—and off you went. Alone.”

“Well. Yes—” James had known he wasn’t managing to convey how it had been; he’d been too taken by surprise. The tone of this was all wrong, hampering his wits from jumping to his defence. The use of ‘James’ in the middle of this. Lewis knew full well how this went. You got caught up in an idea that suddenly put you on a trail not-yet-cold, and, okay, so the time it took to wait for uniform largely wasn’t going to make much difference, most of the time, but you could see the last elusive piece of the whole confounding thing finally dangling, just out of reach, so you went straight after it. Lewis did it all the time. James dogs his footsteps on cases for that very reason, particularly since Bethan Vickery had come at him with that knife—

James had looked carefully at him.

“And those texts. You did the same to me with Lipton in his cottage, weeks back, and I swear, this coming on top of that—”

“I didn’t, sir. I never texted you then, and I didn't even know he was a suspect when I got there. You called me while I was with him, and I had to hang up on you just when we’d realised—”

Lewis had stopped, frowning. “That’s—” Then he’d taken that in, a mental review of recent history. “Yes,” he’d conceded. But as if that was a mere inconsequential detail. And then, with more conviction. “Yes, that’s quite true.”

Then he’d muttered something Innocent-esque about procedure being there for a reason, which would have made James laugh aloud in other circumstances. And he’d turned and left. Just taken himself abruptly off down the stairs. James hadn’t remotely felt like laughing. He hadn’t moved to go after Lewis at first because his heart had decided to shoehorn a few extra beats in, in compensation for that missed one, and it had been making him lightheaded. When he had made it out to the landing, it was only to find that Julie Lockhart was standing guarding the top of the stairwell, her cheeks as heated as if she was the one who Lewis had—not had a go at—like that.

“Sarge,” she’d murmured, looking straight ahead when he’d glanced at her.

During their interview with Kemp, Lewis had seemed more focused on the matter in hand than distant, exactly, but afterwards he’d disappeared from their usual orbit without saying where.

When it’d reached respectable knocking-off time, and a wary James had completed all the necessary, impeccably, and in record time, Lewis had rematerialised and stuck his head in their office door with a: “You coming or not?” James had eyed him, as they’d progressed through the station, and seen the squall had long subsided. And with Lewis that meant subsided.

Whatever is playing on his mind, underneath all this now, he’s certainly not angry anymore. Presumably he’d taken himself off for one of his coffees with Laura, and she’d worked her magic.

Either way, this will settle. It always does. The cases make these things happen, and, if they’re given a jolt, sometimes, they’re also given reasons, like jeopardy and stress and heightened emotions, to explain that away. And afterwards they can put anything like this to one side, and carry on as usual. As they’ve always done.

Lewis has taken a long drink from his pint while he contemplates the street outside. James watches the duskier swirls of light amongst the amber, as its undercurrents spiral up to the surface, resettling after the disturbance. Lewis’ hand is cradling the glass and is in sunlight too. It makes James think of how the surface temperature of his palms must be consistently higher than James’ own because every touch to James’ arm, or back, or shoulder from Lewis’ hands—restraining, warning, silencing, steadying—they’re always warm.

The sunlight plays lazily between them. “Isn’t the key for unlocking the mysteries of the universe more likely to be at the bottom of your glass?”

“Sir?”

“You started this carry on, on the first case you were assigned to me, you know. With the secret areas of expertise.”

James rouses himself. “Again, sir. Beetles are not an area of expertise. And I think you'll find that was the other way around. You were assigned to me to keep the returning renegade in check.”

“You were my chauffeur, as I recall it.”

“You muscled in on my murder and then wouldn't leave.”

“I must’ve thought you could do with a bit of mentoring from an old hand. Show you how it’s done.”

“You called it,” James enunciates, “being my caretaker.”

Lewis enjoys this far too much. “Did I? That one still rankles does it? Tried to keep you out of trouble ever since, haven't I? It's been an interesting road…”

“I think Innocent was more hoping that I'd provide a steadying and more procedure-driven influence on you. Stop you going off-piste.”

“You won't catch a criminal skiing between the flags—cease and desist with the distraction techniques, Sergeant. My point is that’s when I first discovered your rowing glories. And that was just the start of it. So far from you, at critical moments in cases, we've had botany, we’ve had Jacobean revenge tragedies, ancient Greek ones come to that, more Latin than you can shake a stick at, and Greek too while you were at it, and the mythology to go with it, we’ve had ancient Iraqi towns that memorably turn out to be in books the Chief Super used to fantasize about, Nietzsche right in the middle of things, the romantic poets, a constant steady sprinkling of literature, far too bloody many Shakespearean references—I’m not necessarily saying that one’s your fault, mind—the oddball lives of even more oddball saints, and all topped off with punctuation marks like the cherries on the cake.”

James stares at him. It’s a dizzying revisting of his murder case history with Lewis.

“Special mention to Charles Dickens prologues,” adds Lewis. “Tenses of. And then it turns out today; there’s beetles. I want to know what other laurels you're hiding under which bushels.

“ _Rest_ on laurels,” James says absently, grimacing in distaste at this mauling of metaphors. Lewis looks at him in disbelief. James appears to have pushed his luck too far with that one. It may, in retrospect, have been the italics. “Lamps under bushels,” he explains himself. Although he’s not sure why he feels the need to. “Bushel is an obsolete word for a bowl. Tyndale just confused things by co-opting it into the new Testament when he was translating it.”

“Yes, you see, exactly,” says Lewis, pointing a pen at him. James hadn’t seen the pen appear. It’s not often Lewis and the New Testament find something in common. “Get out your notebook like a proper policeman now. I’m not having you looking up things on that phone.”

James takes an enjoyable sip of his pint. He finds himself still oddly touched by that list. “Ah. No. Can’t, sir. That’d be misappropriation of resources. You’ve had the pleasure of the memos too.”

Lewis rolls his eyes. “We’ll make do,” he says, tugging the beermat out from below his glass. There’s the brief brush and press of his leg against James’ own, warm and unacknowledged under the table, as Lewis settles himself back again. Lewis leaves his leg to rest where it’s landed. James lets his own limb stray the tiniest bit closer into the touch, pulled by the warmth.

Lewis clicks his pen open.

“What are you doing?”

“The many secret passions of James Hathaway,” Lewis says, with a certain, worrying, relish.

“And I really wouldn’t say beetles were a passion.”

“You owe me a pint for each one I guess correctly.”

“And I’m playing for what from this arrangement, exactly?”

“Now, now. You can do the same with my areas of expertise. I’ll owe you a pint for each one you guess.”

“This is one of those things where the sergeant can’t win, isn’t it?”

“We can call it familiarisation with the skills of your officers,” Lewis decides. “Your annual review is coming up shortly, Sergeant.”

“Shouldn't we be keep this for a more formal setting then?”

“I don't see why. All the best murders are solved in pubs. I tend to find.”

“And that’s probably not the wisest way to describe homicide cases in my review, sir. Chief Super mightn’t go for it. On so many levels.”

“So where were we? Latin,” says Lewis, not to be swayed, making a dash on the beermat. He’s actually doing this. He follows it up with a whole platoon of little marks.

James finds himself rapidly replaying the list, just as he’d known, even when Lewis was firing it at him, he’d find himself replaying it alone later. “Not Greek,” he says.

“What?”

“You said Greek. I’ve a rudimentary knowledge of Greek, if that—” He catches Lewis’ amusement. “Anyway. One point. One for the ancient languages.”

“Aye, I’m sure it was buy one, get one free you learnt them that easily. That one you always wander off to read when we land up in the Ashmolean. What’s that?”

“The Eteocypriot inscription?”

“You took the word right out of my mouth.”

“I can’t read that. Nobody can. It’s in an extinct language. We need another Rosetta Stone just to translate it.”

“The study of languages,” says Lewis, poised to make yet another mark.

“Linguistics.” Too late, James sees he’s a suspect deliberately provoked into incriminating himself. He should lawyer up. Fast.

“Rather proving my point here, aren’t you? Fair enough, you’re going to be keeping me in pints for a month of Sundays.”

“You should add northern homespun wisdom. You’ve made me an expert in bloody odd sayings.”

“That’s a passion is it? The wisdom of the north?”

“No—”

“Philosophy.” Lewis steams straight on, leaving James floundering in his wake.

“I don’t have a comprehensive knowledge of it.”

“Anyone well enough acquainted to make wisecracks about existential anythings doesn’t get to plead ignorance.”

“The cleverness of me,” James quotes under his breath.

Lewis dashes a line across five sticks, Robinson Crusoe-like.

James is going to be designated driver in perpetuity. Which is something he can’t voice aloud or Lewis will add “posh git” to his fields of expertise. In fairness, James does feel like that that’s a learnt skill that’s taken over sometimes.

He nurses what’s left of his pint and watches out the window, his attention caught by a group of students in early Friday night mode, thronging onto the road. He doesn’t want this pub to be abruptly overwhelmed with noise and liveliness. He doesn’t want the loveliness that is the almost-ordinariness of this evening to shift. But because this is an evening when things have decided to go well, it turns out they’ve merely invaded the road to circle around a car opposite whose driver is showing the same level of disregard for parking restrictions as Lewis does.

Lewis, James has worked out, pays no heed to any parking restrictions that post-date his coming to Oxford or that appeared while he was away. As if he’s still functioning in many ways in his Oxford of the past as he goes about his business. Sometimes the only possible answer when he taps the dashboard and says, ‘park here’ is a perfectly genuine ‘park _where_?’

Although some days, James also suspects the man of having become a police officer purely for the satisfaction he gains from waving on a traffic warden with a flash of his warrant card.

He glances over at Lewis, who is just turning his head away. “What else d’you do in that school of yours then, Hathaway? Horse-riding, fencing, pistols at dawn?”

“I was educated in a public school, sir, not in the Seventeenth Century.”

“Could’ve fooled me from that antiquated schoolmate of yours on the Turnbull case.”

“Psychopathic is the word I think you’re searching for there.”

“I’m willing to bet he didn’t make your newsletter under past pupils’ achievements. David Harvey was delighted to renew old schoolboy friendships when his arresting officer turned out to be none other than James Hathaway, former leading light of this school.”

“And now a lowly sergeant in Thames Valley Police Force,” James finishes and lifts his pint. Lewis gives him a look. “Why are we doing this, again, sir?”

“The other paths, James. The roads not taken. World music,” he pronounces. “With elements of jazz, rock and Medieval madrigals—d’you put anything else in that recipe? Music in general, I suppose. Your guitar, d’you teach yourself that? Any other instruments?”

James sees the grimace of regret that comes a moment too late. He jerks a hand at the dust motes, dancing in the light between them. He's never confirmed to Lewis aloud whether he’d played the piano. It hadn’t, after Lewis’ carefully weighed words on a frosty cold lawn at sunrise, seemed necessary to.

Lewis waits. It’s what he does. Not drawing any attention to his losing James briefly again to the reach of the past. Lewis is the one looking out the window now.

“Here,” he says when he meets James’ eyes in his reflection, “you have a go.” And he pushes the beermat across the surface of the table. There are a lot of marks on it. Neatly trussed in groups of five, like motley sheaves of wheat. Probably a good way to sum up James’ motley range of talents.

“Detecting,” says James.

“Work doesn’t count,” Lewis says, reaching to stop him from making his first mark. James narrows his eyes at him but decides to proceed nonetheless under distinctly unfair disadvantage. “Wagner. You know more than anyone decently should about Wagner’s compositions. Opera in general. Gardening.” And then, anticipating Lewis’ protest, “Allotments anyway. Or—growing vegetables.”

“Growing vegetables? I was hardly getting started when I stopped.”

“Why did you give that allotment back? Sir?”

Lewis scratches his nose and takes a sip from his pint. That one’s still not getting an answer.

“A wholly unnecessary knowledge of the wildly fluctuating fortunes of Newcastle football team. Cricket. There are professional players who don’t know the obscure rules you know.” An immense capacity to cover up misdemeanours that should have ended your sergeant’s career. This many years on, James still can’t begin to work out how Lewis had explained away the entire Zoe Kenneth situation to save James twice over. An equally immense capacity for tempering anger with forgiveness.

Lewis reclaims the beermat in satisfaction, while James is trying to locate and extract anything he can safely voice, and starts to tally up their marks.

“It’s not quite fair,” James says. “Your subjects are less noticeable, day to day in our cases. Because it’s Oxford.”

Lewis pauses. “Don’t know if that’s true. Laura Hobson once suggested my specialist subject was loneliness. I’ll take vegetable-growing over that.”

She’d said what? James opens his mouth, not knowing what he has to say but moved by the indignant need to mitigate this on Lewis’ behalf all the same.

“Well,” says Lewis. “I think I’ve made a fair innings. Probably barely scratched your surface though. You ready for another?”

“I'll have to put that thought on hold, sir.” James says, reaching behind him to manoeuvre himself into his suit jacket.

“You off then?”

It sounds like a real question instead of the rhetorical one it surely is. Lewis knows he has rehearsal. They hadn’t come straight here. They’d detoured to pick up James’ guitar. James taps the case in reply.

“I see.” Lewis nods equably.

And he won’t have forgotten this is a rehearsal-Friday, anyway, he never does.

And yet, for a moment, James is sorely tempted. To shrug the jacket back off, lean back in the chair, and slide the ridiculous beermat back over to his side of the table instead. He can see the corner of Lewis’ mouth lifting in pleased acknowledgement as clearly as if he had.

He stands to down the rest of his pint instead, and pull on his coat, sketching a farewell wave at Lewis.

“You owe me a pint, Hathaway,” Lewis says, brandishing the beermat.

The evening cold of the street invades the pub as James pulls opens the door. He hoists his guitar, and the last of the day’s sunlight remembers the back of his neck as he bends his head to draw a cigarette from the packet. He glances back into the pub, even while feeling in his pocket for his lighter.

Afterwards, he’ll always be glad that he did, at least, do that.

As the door swings slowly shut, he watches a narrowing picture of Lewis through a parted sea of bodies. Lewis still has one hand cradling his pint glass. He looks like a man well-accustomed to sitting finishing his pint peaceably alone. He looks perfectly satisfied to be just where he is right now, not at all bothered by those around him.

And he’s still looking amused.

James lets himself grin, in unseen response, before the door closes, shutting in the noise of the pub, and the disruptive street noise takes over.

Afterwards, he’ll wish that he’d captured a photograph of that exact moment. Out of fear he’ll lose sight of that final picture of Lewis in his mind.

For a long time afterwards he’ll wish that he had stayed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are references to canon-typical crime scenes in this chapter and thoughts and dialogue referencing suicide or suspicious death. Nothing graphic is included.

It’s a curiously bright day.

The temperature has dropped overnight. It’s freezing cold as James heads into the station, making him hunch into his coat even for just that short walk across the car park. The novelty of it means it holds no real threat.

He’d gone for a run over the weekend at light-turning time, which mustn’t have happened for a couple of weeks, because the lack of any preamble to the darkness had taken him by surprise and told him that winter was distinctly likely to happen after all. He’d found it more exhilarating than anything else.

This morning the air is still and gently freezing, with no movement to lift the frost.

And there’s something happening in the squad room. Innocent is briefing with Peterson beside her. So most likely a drugs raid. James slows, as she registers his presence, in case it’s an all hands on deck situation. She catches his eye, hesitates, but doesn’t signal him into the huddle.

There’s so sign of Lewis, when he reaches the office, so he’s started on an initial triage of Monday morning’s inbox when Innocent appears in the doorway.

“Hathaway.” He glances up. “My office.”

“Inspector Lewis isn’t in yet,” James tries. She doesn’t play. _Not in the mood for your quasi-helpful obstructiveness this morning, Sergeant,_ he mentally translates the look he gets.

She inclines her head. “My office.”

Despite all that efficient rounding up, she seems in no hurry once she’s behind her desk, with her door firmly shut behind them.

“James.”

She’s switched mode, and it alerts him. This isn’t how she starts a mild carpeting for failing to follow proper procedure with evidence-handling. This isn’t about stone scarab beetles.

“Ma’am,” he says guardedly.

“Take a seat.”

He looks down at her. She motions to the chair, waiting. He pulls it out and sits.

Her eyes settle on him, and still she doesn’t get to her point. Then she changes tack and straightens a letter on her desk. By the time she glances up again, he’s staring at her.

“James. Inspector Lewis won’t be coming in.”

“…today,” he amends for her when the pause goes on too long. It seems important to thwart that full stop.

“Not today. Not at all. Wait—” She holds up a hand as if to prevent an interruption. “There’s been a development in an old case of his. Lewis’ testimony is needed in an upcoming prosecution, as part of a much bigger case outside of our jurisdiction. But there have been threats. Very credible threats…he’s been taken into witness protection.”

“What?”

“I know this is a shock—”

“But what do you mean?”

She just looks at him, steadily now. “You understand what I’m saying, Sergeant.”

Once, on an early morning training session at Cambridge, with the river a cold freezing mirror; they’d begun to ship water. It had been shortly after final team selection. They’d started to become that entity, beyond the sum total of their individual power and skill, that’d push them first over the finishing line, weeks later. James had first felt it within their grasp that morning. Rowing was something that made sense beyond thought. Like music, almost. But those lightweight shells got overwhelmed incredibly fast when something went properly wrong, and it’d gone down. It had been brutally, paralysingly, criminally cold. He’d pictured, at the time, when he couldn’t find air to breathe, that the cold must have physically stilled his lungs. Now he understands it had been a much deeper and more elemental protest than that.

“James,” Innocent says from a distance. As if she’s the one underwater.

“No,” he says, flatly.

“He went on Friday evening.”

“Friday?” He sits back so fast, in the rush of relief, that he feels the chair jam hard into his upper back. “But I was with him on Friday. So that can’t be right.”

“They lifted him from the pub. Discreetly. I’m not sure if—”

“The pub? What time?”

She pauses. “They waited for you to leave.”

The whole evening, a carefully folded and stored memory, pressed in the leaves of a book, starts to spin and dissemble and fall into entirely different parts in James’ mind. “I never saw,” he says aloud to himself, in wonder.

“They’d hardly have been doing a very good job if you did.”

James is too stunned to object that he’s hardly a civilian.

“But I didn't—” His mind is replaying the sunlight as he’d headed out onto the street, caught in the afterglow of the evening, of Lewis' words, hoisting his guitar, lighting up… and then he rewinds, snared by one of those odd things that stand out. Afterwards.

“The car,” he says blankly. “I saw the car. There were two men in it, not in suits—”

Innocent takes pity. “It’s not a crime for you to reconstruct. We know who took him. They’re not the problem. Although not a joy and a half to deal with either,” she mutters to herself. “You needn’t think anyone did me the courtesy of letting me know, before it was a done deed.”

He leans forward, without knowing he was going to do so. “When did they tell you?”

“That’s not the—”

“When?”

“Hathaway,” she says slowly. Her eyebrows move unhappily, so he struggles to make his expression a notch more deferential. She gives in. “I heard nothing until late on Friday night.”

Lewis is a weekend and an unknown distance away already. She’s let the distance stretch and Lewis become lost, out of reach, before she's let him know.

He tries to blunt down his anger, in the urgency of explaining this to her so she’ll listen. Because something is very wrong here. Lewis wouldn’t just go. Without a word to—anyone. There’s no way he would just up and leave. And one thing James knows, from years of being Lewis’ backup, is that Lewis wouldn’t agree to this for his own personal safety.

“You don’t understand. He wouldn’t go with them; he wouldn’t give in like that.”

“It is _not_ giving in,” Innocent says sharply, “to have the basic self-preservation instincts—” She stops. _Not the moment,_ James sees her tell herself.

She’d had a word with him after the shotgun incident. An appraising, surprisingly uncomfortable, word it had been too. James had argued, in astonishment, that Mrs Temple would have killed herself if he hadn’t dived to divert the gun’s trajectory, even just the little he’d managed. But then she’d had another word, more recently, after she’d learnt that James hadn’t waited when he’d reached Judith Suskin’s house. Not for Lewis, nor for the speedily approaching backup, but he’d gone right ahead playing decoy on her garden lawn, trying to deflect the gunman’s attention to himself.

She hadn’t been able to fault his actions, or dedication, Innocent had said, in the face of his reaction at being carpeted over this. She’d simply wanted to point out that there was a pattern emerging here, didn’t he think so? Food for thought, she’d suggested when they had reached an impasse. The pattern of being a ruddy policeman, James had thought. It wasn’t food he’d chosen to digest either. Nor had he passed on to Lewis that he’d been summoned for — that.

Which was just as well, considering. Lewis’ words on Friday, in Kemp‘s study, suddenly collide with what Innocent is biting her tongue against now. And James, startled, sees for a moment how it looks from the outside. He sees how it must look, but it doesn’t feel that way on the inside of it. He’s just doing — not so much his job but what he should. Needs to, for some reason. He pushes away the thought of it and pushes away, too, hard, that picture of Lewis, on Friday morning, looking almost-grey.

“He still wouldn’t have agreed though. I mean—even if you think he should have—he wouldn’t.”

Something passes across Innocent’s expression that from someone else, in other circumstances, he’d see as a flinch. It’s gone so quickly that he wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t gone into heightened awareness mode now, the way he does in interrogations, watching for reactions at Lewis’ side.

And because he can’t afford to care what could have put that look on her face, he jams his hands down in his trouser pockets and waits, staring at her.

Innocent looks out her window at the car park, for a long moment, before turning back to him.

“Sergeant. A career criminal was picked up last week on a narcotics charge. He’s offered to turn evidence on a unsolved murder case which Inspector Lewis was running shortly before he left for his overseas attachment in the British Virgin Islands. An investigation which had unexpectedly taken Inspector Lewis and Sergeant McLennan far closer than anyone had expected to a major drugs ring. Their murder case never reached court because a piece of key evidence went missing. It was put down to procedural error at the time. Due to that, and the intervention of the Met, once they saw the size of the bigger fish they could net with this one, the case was removed from Oxfordshire police force. The information we are now being offered—it attests instead that Sergeant McLennan concealed evidence.”

Ali McLennan had gotten into her extra-curricular activities on a case with _gang_ connections?

“The new information also makes Inspector Lewis’ statement vitally important. He knows how much they need his testimony and how much is at stake here—there’s a real chance to bring down a major organised crime ring that’s caused untold misery and consumed a huge amount of manpower and resources for years.”

James frowns, briefly silenced. More so than the possibility of being instrumental in bringing down any gang, what would needle at Lewis would be his murder case. He’d generally do anything necessary to assist with an old unsolved case—and James can only imagine his reaction at having had an unsolved case taken off him, for any reason—but that surely doesn’t mean he’d agree to this? He tries to imagine Lewis, right beside him here, hearing all this. Lewis would say he’d take his chances thanks, ma’am. Wouldn’t he?

“Even if he wasn’t easily convinced for his own safety—God help them,” Innocent mutters, “he knows that for the family to get proper restitution—”

“Family?”

“Lewis’ murder case concerned a boy who was then in his late teens,” she says, briefly. “Who was thought to have simply witnessed more than he should have. Wrong place at the wrong time. I remember it. Chris was around that age then. As I heard it, Lewis’ agreement was on the basis that if it helped the family, after all these years, to find out what had happened, then he owed them that at least. To make sure they got his testimony.”

It sounds like Lewis. It’s hearing words that sound like Lewis himself, in the midst of all this coming at him, that makes the deepest, least reasonable, part of James’ being, that part which is protesting so very hard against the impossibility of this having happened; start to waver. It sounds like what Lewis had said, after trying to tell Michelle Marber the truth about what had happened to her son.

Lewis had come back out of her house, eventually, that afternoon, and leaned in the car door, shaking his head. “And what are you still doing sitting here?” he’d said. But he’d climbed into the passenger seat and shut the car door.

“What did you say to her?” James had asked, without making any move to start the car.

There had been a pause for long enough that James had thought that was his answer.

“I told her,” Lewis had said, looking straight ahead out the windscreen, down the street, “what I told her first a few days ago. That I think about my wife every day, but about her death, about the accident, only every other day now. It told her it’d helped me in the end. Knowing.”

It had been the one and only time since Monkford’s conviction that Lewis had alluded to it to James.

Lewis won’t have forgotten that teenage boy or his family. He’ll have carried the knowledge with him, as he does with any unsolved death. Right along with the weight and the pain of his own loss. One of the things that had quietly drawn James, when Lewis had first returned to Oxford, was that this man had come back and resumed doing, for others, exactly what he’d needed someone to do for him. He’d fought for a chance to resume doing it, in fact. He’d still given his all, tenaciously, to bring some sort of redemptive justice to everyone else when he’d given up ever expecting that for himself. Lewis wouldn't have put it like that, James knows. James, watching, had thought it quietly extraordinary.

And now Lewis has been asked to weigh up all that he has to give up, against the chance to bring that solace to another grieving family. On a case where his sergeant, under his supervision, had probably denied them all an outcome years ago. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

“It was his choice, James.” Innocent, taking advantage of his silence, unlocks her desk drawer and reaches into a padded envelope. “This came this morning. Lewis told them it was part of an ongoing investigation and needed to be given to his sergeant.”

It’s the beermat. It’s in an evidence bag.

James finds his hand has reached out of its own accord. He flexes and straightens it, so it looks a bit steadier. “Can I…”

“Which investigation? Sergeant? The only reason they agreed to pass it on was because they’d seen the two of you doing things with it before they ever approached Lewis.” She peers at it before she hands it over. “Is it some sort of code?”

Like every communication from Lewis, it's both apparently simple and not remotely straightforward at all. James shakes his head briefly at her. He’s lost in the dashes, firmly indented into the soft cardboard by Lewis’ sure hand. There had been that warm press of Lewis’ leg, under the pub table on Friday evening. Resting lightly; undemanding, unacknowledged, but uncorrected, against James’ own.

“What does he mean by it?”

James lifts his head. “Nothing. It's more of an aide memoire—so we can remember where we've got to.” It’s Lewis being Lewis, and James is starting to feeling the ache of that already as the numbness begins to wear off. “He's saying I owe him a pint.”

Innocent very plainly does not believe him. She reaches out, as if to take another, closer, look while he explains it to her. James’ fingers tighten round it. He shoves the beermat squarely into his neatly tailored trouser pocket.

“I suppose, if they feel it’s safe enough to give to you,” she says, dubious. It turns out that’s only the first item on her agenda.

“His family have been informed. His children. You know how this goes. They’ll be kept informed, in the limited sense of the word that applies to them, and they can have controlled contact once he’s settled. And you are not to, very obviously not to, Sergeant, contact his daughter. As far as everyone else is concerned; they’ll be told he’s had a health crisis. His prostate. The women will think they know what you’re saying and won’t push too much. The men will be more than keen to avoid the entire topic altogether.” She eyes him. “I’ll need you to confirm that cover. When people ask you.”

James is outraged. “That’s not fair—to make people think he’s seriously ill—”

“It’s for his own benefit. He needs to be as far below below the radar as possible on this. If you have difficulty, or if anyone persists, you'll point them in my direction. Besides—eventually they’ll stop asking.” She shrugs at his look, her eyes tired. Those lines around her eyes are deeper this morning.

James finds he cares not one whit. “What about people outside the station?” It comes out like a demand. Although he’s currently unable to come up with one single friend of Lewis’ who is not, at least formerly, a police officer.

“Any friend of his who becomes really concerned that they can’t get in touch will obviously contact his place of work. And be referred to me.” She has it all worked out. All worked out as if this is something that just needs to be properly organised. As if Lewis can just successfully disappear, and no-one know where he is, if he’s still okay. To her this has been a fait accompli for days.

Then she frowns. “Hold on. There’s a cat isn’t there?”

“What?”

“I’m well aware he never did relinquish that cat to the proper authorities, Hathaway. I’ve bumped into him in Sainsbury’s with a tin of Whiskas in his basket that looked more appetising than the meal he had for himself—there isn’t a whole souvenir menagerie I don’t know about, that he’s accumulated over the years?”

As if Lewis made a habit … And then James hears his own voice in his head, making a far worse accusation, but in a similar vein, on the case where Lewis had rescued Monty. ‘ _I’m not sure I want to wake up in twenty years time, old, and with nothing more to show than a life spent picking through other people’s misery_.’ The glaring winter sun in the car park, outside Innocent’s office window, and the horribly exposed sun hitting his eyes that appalling day by Crevecoeur’s lake, collide and dizzy him. He hasn’t lost Lewis. Not like he nearly did back then. He hasn’t lost him. It’s just the suddenness of this that’s making him feel like one of Crevecoeur’s horses has kicked him in the chest.

And Innocent is trying to make light of this. She completely misinterprets the way he must be staring at her. ”Will it have been locked in all weekend?” She looks awkward. “I’d forgotten. I would have contacted you sooner if—”

He could have been told sooner if she’d thought of Monty?

“It’s a ground floor flat,” he says brusquely. “There's a cat door. He just goes to bother the neighbours to be fed.”

How Lewis had managed to wrangle permission to install a cat door in a rented flat is beyond James. Always assuming he had bothered with the formality of actually asking anyone. Its installation is probably about as legit as Lewis keeping Monty.

“Take care of it, will you?”

The situation with the cat or Monty himself?

“And the neighbours. Are any of them likely to get overly concerned?”

“Sort of. Lewis keeps to himself, but he's the sort his elderly neighbour will knock for if a fuse goes, or someone thinks there’s an intruder outside.” Lewis, James has observed, becomes that person really quickly whenever he moves into a new building.

“Then you'll tell them the same cover story. Perhaps giving the impression he’s gone for an inpatient stay elsewhere, near extended family…”

“Why would I be telling them—”

“You seem to have a basic level of acquaintanceship there.”

Touché. He stares over her head, at one of her framed certificates of commendation.

She taps a finger gently on her desk to force his attention back to her. “Look. You’re not necessarily needed on this case this morning. We don’t know we’re dealing with anything of note yet. And you’re more than due time in lieu. Take today to let it sink in, get used the idea—”

Get used to this?

“No,” he says, abrupt. And then, “No. Thank you, ma’am. There’s no need.”

“James—”

He thinks back to that controlled flurry of activity in the squadroom, before she’d pulled him out of that world and into this separate nightmare. “What’s the case?”

She’s visibly torn. “An early morning dog walker found a body out at Wytham,” she says, reluctantly. “It would be useful if you could—but if you need more time—”

He’s already standing, setting his chair firmly back in to the desk. “I’ll join the rest at the scene.” A carapace. This, he can do. When Innocent continues to look at him, he lets it tighten more irrevocably around him.

“It’s like you said, ma’am, I know how these things go.”

She lets him go.

=

Lewis never likes Wytham Woods. Coming here always makes him snappish. James takes the car, slowly, as far as possible down a track of sorts until it ends in an roughly surfaced area that could be called a car park.

It’s not a landscape out here, either, suggestive of the aftermath of any storms. There are no roughly ripped off branches, no trees looking shorn and shocked. There’s nothing at all out of place except for the fresh scar on a sore part of James’ soul.

What there is, is the early morning light, the old overhanging trees brushed with white, standing back from the path, stately and untroubled. The world seemingly just as it was in yesterday’s sun, but lightly arrested out here by the frost. And a whole host of people; uniforms and SOCO. And Laura amongst them, kneeling beside the body. She looks up at the thud of his car door closing. Her face lightens a little as she glances over at the passenger side. Then she looks back at James; a query.

Laura. God. Laura.

He sends her a quick shrug. A moment too late; because her eyes narrow at him before one of her assistants asks her something, and Laura, her gaze still on James, answers with some sort of instruction that sends the assistant off.

James ignores the space she’s created for him to come over and explain and largely avoids her scrutiny for the next few minutes by simple means of standing just inside the edge of the cordon and focusing on the body.

The recently deceased is a woman who looks to be in her mid-twenties, with no visible signs of how she’d met her end. She has a coat on, but it’s open and has fallen away from her body. Ditto her trailing scarf. Despite this disarrangement, and her long loose dark hair, she somehow gives the impression of having been neatly arranged. Whether by herself, or by someone else seeking to give that impression, it’s impossible to tell.

“Nothing to identify her, sir,” Julie tells him, unobtrusively appearing to hand him a scene suit and get him up to speed. “Her pockets are empty. Dr Hobson estimates between midnight and three-ish this morning.”

Peterson, returning from a conversation with his own sergeant, ducks under the tape and gives James a brief nod. “Anything else you can give me at this stage, Laura?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Any signs she may have taken something to help her along, if it is suicide?”

Laura looks up at him, her glance flickering over James again. He focuses on suiting up. “Nothing that’s obvious at first look,” she tells Peterson. “You’ll have to wait for toxicology.”

Peterson nods as if she’s made an original pronouncement.

James vaguely registers that Laura seems more frustrated by Peterson’s professional deference to this than she ever is by Lewis’ persistent attempts to ask her impossible questions at the scene. Peterson doesn’t dance well with her. Lewis, in his impatience, with the bit already between his teeth, matches the strength of her feelings, giving her an outlet, without seeming to think about it much, to express her ire at the world and what it’s done now.

Whatever the world has done to this woman, it’s left her lying mere feet from the path on a bed of leaves. The frost has picked out all their veins in a delicate tracery, making them seem all the more friable. Fissile. James realises he’s gazing at them, in all of their fragile beauty, and he lifts his head instead to look around, trying to picture last night.

She could simply have come here picturing a peaceful end. People being so often drawn to the trees for comfort at the last. She might have thought she’d let hypothermia help things along. The cold speed things up and the dazed numbness help matters. The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But she’s right beside a path. And he feels she’d go deeper into the woods if this was of her choice. Not lie down beside something so brutally manmade. And she’d want shelter overhead, if just for comfort. A canopy of trees.

He does not remotely picture himself sharing that close-to-the-bone idea with Peterson. Although it’d be enough to give Lewis a bit of it, and, if he’d shoot James a sharply appraising look, James would meet it with a questioning one, and then Lewis—well he’d have already worked out for himself what didn’t fit…and James sees there may be an easier way to do this, mercifully delivered by Lewis.

“May I?” he asks Laura.

She nods.

He approaches and crouches down, and snaps on a glove, then draws the hidden left hand gently out from under the body. “The wedding ring,” he says, with a nod at it. And stands too suddenly.

Luckily Julie has also been tutored in the school of Robbie Lewis, and his habit of mulling over the little things about people that turn out not to be so little in the end. She starts to explain that one to Peterson, tactfully avoiding the source. Laura is still looking at James.

“I’ll see if anyone—” He nods over at the small gate lodge, just visible at the furthest edge of the tree line.

“No-one’s there, Sarge,” Julie tells him.

“Well, maybe they are by now.”

He cuts across a clearing. The deceptively solid-looking layer of frost gives way under his shoes and lets him do more brittle damage to the winter growth than he otherwise could. The chill damp from the brush of the frozen grasses seeps right through to his calves. There’s the crunch of his footsteps in the silence and the odd carrying sound from SOCO, searching the copse of trees on the far side of the scene. And yet none of it feels quite real.

He stops short once he gains the cover of the tree line.

On the morning when the boat had gone under, when the cold had reached out and locked an iron vice across his chest, he had understood for the first time how hard it could be to fight that and strike out for the shore. Why someone might just sink into the cold numbness instead. In so much as he was able to think, it had confusingly seemed the easier option. Just to stop.

Then someone had hauled on his arm, and it’d turned out it wasn’t entirely up to him anyway.

His coach, having had a view of things from the clarity of the bank, had had a few extra bruising words for him later during the—could you use the word debriefing for something that contained so many swearwords? —on the debacle. ‘…and when you land up in the bloody river it’s no time for morning bloody matins, Hathaway.’

And despite all the training, despite knowing how cold water makes you gasp and robs your breath and what to do—‘You bloody well turn over and you bloody well float to get your breath back, Number Seven.’—James had had no way to explain it afterwards. So he’d tried to give the whole thing very little thought. It had been ridiculous. Cambridge’s elite rowers did not drown during early morning training sessions on the Ouse.

There’s a noise behind him which has nothing to do with the river and student days. It’s scene suits and Oxford and bodies in the long grass. The familiar pace of the rustling tells him who it is before he turns. Laura treads carefully, but purposefully, over to him, just as she's done at so many crime scenes before while Lewis—

Her eyes are quizzical, ready to be amused. “What on earth have you done then? To manage to get yourself reassigned?”

“What?”

“Turning up here as another inspector’s sergeant. I know Robbie. He likes to keep you close enough at hand even when there isn’t a case. He doesn’t share you. How come Alan managed to get you? How come Alan managed to get a suspicious death, come to that?”

James is suddenly, in the midst of it all, charmed. Because Lewis really doesn’t share him. He never does. ‘ _Ah, not today, sorry, Grainger. I’ve got plans for him.’_ And the hand prompting James, on the small of his back, will become a little more forceful than usual. Lewis, exerting his claim in such easily certain terms that no-one questions it.

And now it hits James, as he stares back at Laura, that he’s also lost his place here in one fell swoop. He’s not Lewis’ sergeant anymore.

Laura’s expression changes. A flicker of uncertainty. “Have you two had some sort of a—” She visibly stops to rephrase “—are you in his bad books?” Her eyes keep reading him. She stills. Then she reaches for his arm.

Whatever she’s seeing, what he sees is the blessed reality of Laura amongst all of this. Here’s someone who will see how bloody impossible and wrong it is. Lewis can’t be gone.

“James? What’s happened?”

So he tells her.

=

He turns himself in as soon as he gets back.

When Innocent sees him in the outer office, she looks relieved. She beckons him in and motions him to sit, while she finishes writing something.

He finds he can’t endure the wait. “I told Doctor Hobson.” It doesn’t come out very penitent, and it’s a lot more abrupt than he’d intended.

She glances up. “You told Doctor Hobson what?” she asks. Then as he says nothing, and the silence takes on weight, he sees her expression change rapidly. “You _told_ Laura Hobson? A civilian?”

“She’s hardly a—”

“You told her that Inspector Lewis has been taken into witness protection?”

“Yes. But—nothing about the case.” She’s still staring at him in disbelief. Which is, he knows, so very justified, so completely warranted. But—“She would never have accepted that story about Lewis being ill,” he argues. “It wouldn’t have been fair to tell her that.”

“And I would have dealt with that. She hadn’t been forgotten. She was on the list. You should have referred her to me. You were told to point anyone who asked in my direction. And instead you took it upon yourself—” She stops and takes a breath.

He’s underestimated this. She’s furious, he sees. But part of him almost welcomes it. Laura had stared at him, stunned. He’d wanted Innocent to have been more—stunned. Not as reasoned as she was this morning. Not accepting this. Not organising things, and the way James was to respond, like it was some sort of management issue. Innocent is making up for that now. But her unguarded anger still comes as a relief; he’d needed a less controlled response that comes nearer to doing justice to what’s happened. And it gives him something to fight against properly.

“You and he,” she says, bitterly, “always, _always_ , have this ingrained belief that your own moral codes take precedence over the entire system and neither of you—”

She stops. He swallows. He doesn’t have time to wonder why she’s angry at Lewis too because she’s only gathering purpose and conviction. “I told you. I told you repeatedly this morning. That you were not to contact anyone, not to pursue this—”

“I didn’t.”

“—and the first thing you do—”

“It wasn’t like that.”

Laura had stared at him and gone quiet. Her hand had stayed on his arm. She’d looked up at him like she was searching his face for more information than the little he’d just given her. Or a way to understand. Then one of her assistants had called to her, and she’d turned her head in their direction.

When she’d turned back to look at James, her gaze wasn’t meeting his any more; it wasn’t quite focused. “I have to—”

“Go,” he’d said, and she’d looked up at him properly then.

“I’ll talk to you, later, James, okay?”

“Okay,” he’d agreed, distracted himself now by the activity on the far side of the clearing. Then he’d felt a squeeze to his arm, and she’d been making her way back through the silvered grasses again.

Innocent is waiting silently for his attention now. “And what if,” she asks, evenly, “Laura Hobson also takes it upon herself to decide someone else should know?”

“She won't. I know she won’t. She'd never do anything to put him at risk.”

She gazes at him deliberately and raises her eyebrows. She says nothing at all. Waiting until he sees. James suddenly wants to punch something. “I wasn’t putting him at risk,” he says, when he has the air back in his lungs to say anything again. “Telling her.”

“Inspector Lewis decided this, it was his choice, and he agreed to it. Now he’s barely gone, and already you’ve jeopardised this for him, you’ve risked his safety.”

“I haven’t. It’s not like that.”

She only continues to look at him while he tries to avoid seeing this through her eyes.

“It won’t happen again,” he admits grudgingly.

“No. It won't. You won't be receiving any more updates.”

She must see something in his face because she immediately modifies her words. But without retracting them.

“James. It’s not like anyone will see fit to give me updates.”

“But you’ll get to hear things.” The tightness in his throat means the sentence takes longer to get out than it should.

She doesn’t bother to deny this, just inclines her head to acknowledge it. “But you shouldn’t have been told even as much—it’s best you’re kept out of this completely now,” she says.

It’s the shift to almost-kindness that shows him she’s made up her mind. This is not a decision born of frustration with him. She’s calmed down because she thinks this is the right thing to do.

He tries anyway, rapidly, as he can see this last branch slipping away out of his fingertip hold, and the current is trying to take him.

“Doctor Hobson—she’s really not just anyone. Not to Lewis.”

“I was under the impression…unless I’m behind the times…”

“No.” It’s one of the most surreal Monday mornings of his life, and he’s standing in Innocent’s office attempting to describe the relationship between Lewis and Laura. Even James, who feels he has a whole Lewis-Hobson lexicon running through his mind some days, doesn’t know how to do that. He wonders if Lewis or Laura can. If they’d use the same word as each other. “They’re the same as they’ve always been.”

Innocent doesn’t seem to have a word for what that is either. But one thing it isn’t is a significant other. Because Lewis would have been asked about a significant other. And Lewis must have said no. Or Laura would have been higher up on Innocent’s list. And this could have been avoided.

“But I did know it wasn't a risk telling her—”

“That wasn’t up to you to decide. And you knew that. You’re too close to this. You’re emotionally involved, and your judgement is impaired.”

“I can manage it.”

“You won’t be required to. It’s better this way, James. Go home now.”

It’s not a suggestion this time. It’s not even an order. The weariness isn’t in hiding anymore.

It’s just what she’d told him to do in the first place.

=

Taking Monty hostage against his will turns out to be far more difficult than taking Lewis apparently was. James’ mistake was not pouncing as soon as he’d let himself in.

And things had obviously escalated very fast with this case then. Because a quick investigation of the flat shows no sign that Lewis had been allowed back here to fetch anything.

All the detritus from their hurried Friday morning, when James had picked Lewis up early, had been left sitting waiting for Friday night. Or as it turns out, to accost James now. Toast plates with crumbs, a smeary shared butter knife, bone-dry coffee mugs; and the woollen jumper hung over a chair that Lewis wears on cooler mornings and discards after breakfast for his jacket and tie.

If Lewis was here, James would tell him how everyone getting the name of the Mary Celeste wrong was Arthur Conan Doyle’s fault. How the images of sudden and acute desertion the words of his story had painted, when his imagination had been captured by the ship, had been so vivid they’d become ingrained in turn on his reader’s imaginations, superseding the actual account. James would be a bit insufferable. Just to make Lewis roll his eyes and never seem to find him so.

Because it all looks as if, at any moment, Lewis’ key will sound in the lock; and he’ll walk in as if this were all some huge mistake, bemusedly dismissing all the fuss.

In the time it takes for James to wash up, Monty, initially underfoot, has lost interest in him, and he’s now taken up firm residence in his habitual spot; practically wedged under the kitchen radiator. He measures his eyes back down to slits and pointedly ignores all entreaties. He’s not coming back out. A Lewisless James must be less worthy of his attention.

Well, if Muhammad won’t come to the mountain then perhaps the mountain should therefore sit on the couch. Muhammad usually finds a handy lap irresistible. Particularly, in James’s experience, when he’s wearing his best suit trousers. He sinks down on Lewis’ couch. Then he lets his head fall back. He’s stopped. For the first time since he followed Innocent into her office this morning, it feels like. He’s unsure he can start again. He’s sitting on Lewis’ couch, and Lewis isn’t here.

He’s not sure how long he’s been sitting there when his phone starts up.

He hadn’t actually expected to hear from Laura. She’ll be up to her eyes after today’s developments.

“I’ve come over to his to get Monty,” he explains. Much as if Innocent is in the habit of dispatching stray sergeants to pick up stray cats in the middle of a day when they’ve an unexplained body on their hands.

Laura has her mind on other things. “Oh. Monty,” she says. “Good.” But there’s a hesitation there that clues him in, and now he remembers. Laura, of course, has taken Monty before.

“Or you can take him—I mean—I can leave him here for you to pick up later. If you like.” He watches as Monty reemerges, sauntering over to the couch as if it’s entirely his own choice. Then he twines suddenly around James’ legs, pressing hard, warm and tangible and Lewis’ cat. James stares down at him.

“No,” comes Laura’s voice. Sounding thoughtful now. “You should take him. I think that’s a good idea. Besides…”

“If you’re sure?” he asks. Although he’s already bending down to give Monty a ruffle of his neck, now that he’s not going anywhere.

“Well, much as I hate to be denied the dubious pleasure of getting him into that carrier…”

“Is it that bad?” He can only hope she’s teasing. Because Laura, he knows, does not exaggerate.

“Yes. I saw Robbie do it once. Or—I saw him try to.” Her tone changes. “Have you been sent home?”

“I think you’ll be hearing from Innocent.”

“I should think so.”

“She’s on the warpath,” he warns.

“Don’t worry about it, James,” she says, kind. So kindly that he closes his eyes for a moment.

“It’s not your lady of the woods keeping me busy by the way,” Laura tells him. “I don’t know if you’ve heard the update. She’s no longer being treated as a suspicious. Uniform found a note she’d left on her kitchen table.” Lewis, James knows, would ask if the note was handwritten. “She’d been very recently widowed.” Oh. Which is when Lewis would stop asking questions. There’s been too much already in this day.

Monty pushes against the palm of his hand. James opens his eyes to survey him. “So when he went to Italy that time. How exactly did he get Monty to yours?”

“With difficulty.”

Monty is arching his neck, pleasurably, into James’ stilled fingers, perfectly sanguine. He sees James as part of the fixtures and fittings around his home so much so that he doesn’t suspect—“I think I’m having second thoughts.”

“Too late, Hathaway. You have custody of the cat for the duration.”

“Temporary custody—for the duration. I mean—it won’t be for long.”

Her moment of silence is too long for his liking. He straightens up after all, prepared to fight whatever overly-pragmatic thing she’s about to say.

“Look—James. I wish I could meet you for a drink tonight, but I’ll be here until all hours—”

“Of course. I know,” says James, vaguely surprised, but also finding his anger draining away again so quickly that he’s appeased enough to start making silent grimaces at Monty again.

“You take it easy, okay? Look after that cat. Give him a lap to sit in while you’re both recovering from the trauma of the evil wicker thing.”

She’s fond of cats, he recalls, as he returns the phone to his pocket. He’s not sure he hasn’t deprived her of one even now. Well, that is, if he’s capable of doing so. Now that he has a cat in hand and no carrier within reach.

“Once more unto the breach,” he mutters to himself. Then he pauses to fold back his shirt sleeves for good measure.

Protecting his shirt turns out to be a wise precaution and the quote a mistake as Monty turns out to be familiar with the whole speech and decides to take the ‘imitate the action of the tiger’ bit to heart. Also the ‘blast o’ war blows in our ears’ bit. The affront on James’ hearing is nearly worse than that on his forearms.

Once he’s secured, James mutters, “When the hurly-burly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won,” at him, in commiserating fashion, in case he’s more of a Macbeth cat. These things are going to have to be ironed out if they’re to be roommates. Then he exits stage left, wounded, to give Monty a bit of space to calm down and recover his dignity.

He slides open one of the french windows to the patio, and steps out into Lewis’ small enclosed garden, leaning against the wall.

Sometimes, when James arrives early, and is ambling round out here waiting for Lewis to be ready, he’ll find that Lewis has materialised in the doorway. He’ll turn, and Lewis will be standing there, knotting his tie, watching James unapologetically, while he waits for his attention. No-one else watches like Lewis does. Now, when James turns his head, the flat sits silently, a blank exposure of glass.

The frost hasn’t thawed away, and the air is frigid and silent. It’s not snowing, but it might as well be. It might soften the sharp sort of pain that’s taking up residence in his chest.

If James hadn’t left for rehearsal, if the men in the car had seen Lewis settle into making an evening of it with his sergeant, they’d have had to make a move with him there, eventually. If he’d just had the chance to argue, to make Lewis see that he didn’t have to put himself at risk like this, he didn’t have to become quite so embroiled in one of his old cases, that whatever Ali McLennan had done, back then, that still didn’t mean Lewis owed that grieving family—quite this much.

If James had just been there to be the voice of reason saying, “Sir.” And then, with all the urgency someone needed to have said this with, “ _Sir._ ”

Telling himself that the images of acute desertion aren’t real isn’t helping terribly much.

Monty is still staring out of the carrier, dazed and unsure how he got there, rescued by the steady presence of Robbie Lewis once before and yet finding himself abruptly at the mercy of fate once again.

“I know exactly how you feel,” James tells him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are references to, and dialogue concerning, missing persons cases in this chapter.

James casts his glance sidewards for another replenishing glimpse of the river. Lewis had once told him his wife’s aunt had lived in one of these little houses near the weir.

He hates these update visits. The hope that people feel, despite the cautious advance call from the Family Liaison Officer. He’s not sure what Peterson makes of them, because they haven’t reached the stage where they’re willing to complain to each other about directives from on high.

Innocent had returned from the first divisional meeting of the new year in a harbinger of a mood, right at that dangerous tipping point between irked and inspired, and senior officers have been informed they will be giving more attention to accommodating cold case reviews within their caseloads. James heavily suspects that they’ve dropped down the league table in terms of closed cases, that resurrected cold cases recently solved have given some nick or other a boost above them, and that this is posited as the remedy.

In practice, what it’s translated into is senior officers tacking on reviews to the tailend of a week of more pressing concerns. For James, this has translated into yet another half hour today of taking notes on a too-low couch at Peterson’s elbow. Not there’s much here to note.

This isn’t turning out as he’d expected. The file from fifteen years ago had showed a desperate insistence from the family that Georgia Thomas, a then seventeen year old schoolgirl who had simply failed to come home one afternoon, must have been somehow persuaded, if not taken, against her will. The same notes which diligently record these assertions also assert, in a way written to be plainly evident to any officer picking up the file, that the police conclude otherwise. There had been very little to suggest Georgia hadn’t just taken the chance to go of her own accord, and very much of her own planning.

James had expected this encounter with Georgia’s mother to be fraught with that same insistence, the same _Why haven’t you people done more?_ message pulling at him frantically.

But something has shifted since the last time Georgia’s case was pulled into the light. Mrs Thomas is the factor not as expected. For a moment, James wonders if there’s going to be a confession after all. Something about Georgia’s stepfather, perhaps, long gone now.

“I wasn’t home when she went. Things weren’t great with her stepdad and me. They never were, but I thought—while the children were still young. And Georgia, the way she was—she wasn’t helping. I went away to my sister’s for a few days. I took the younger ones, but she had school, you see.”

She’s explaining the ways in which things could have turned out differently. The ways for this not to have happened, after all. It takes James a moment to realise that the difference, now, is that at some point she’s given up on that last hope that this was unpreventable. And she’s chosen to face the different truth instead; that Georgia may have gone, and stayed gone, purely of her own volition. A decade and a half later, she’s trying to work out how she could stop her daughter from making that choice.

She’s not particularly focused on James. She’s laying it out painstakingly, if confusedly, to Peterson, as if it’s important that he understand. She doesn’t want urgent action from them; it’s something else she needs. She’s looking desperately at Peterson as if he holds the power to absolve her.

James glances sideways. Peterson is nodding slowly, but with a considering expression, as if taking all of this on board without indicating agreement or disagreement. It’s not the worst tack to take.

“My other daughter wants me to move to be nearer her and the grandchildren. It’s hard on her because she barely remembers Georgia being home, so she doesn’t quite see why—and I know these days I could be found even if I moved—anyone who wants to be found can be found, these days. But this is where Georgia left me, so if she comes looking, if she needed me, this is where she’d come first. So I can’t move on, you see. I can’t leave any of it behind, even if she has.”

James completely sees. It’s like the last sighting of a drowning man. You keep your eyes fixed on the spot where they last vanished, even as all the ripples smooth out. You don’t take your eyes off the spot, even as you’re too late striking out towards them. Just in case they resurface.

“That last evening I saw her. Maybe I should've—” She waves her hand. Listened, James fills in the blank silently in his head. Taken note. Acted. _Not left,_ comes a voice, unbidden, into his head, but as clearly as if that’s what she’d said.

He stares at her. It turns her focus to him.

“Because I feel like I missed something. Some sign she gave me, and I still don’t know what,” she tells him. “I’ve been over it all, my last evening with her at home. It seemed like she was doing better. Making more of an effort. So it didn’t make any sense she’d go then. Until I realised, afterwards, maybe that was her fixing to go. Her way of saying goodbye. Like there’d been something else she’d meant in what she was saying. And I wasn’t listening or paying attention hard enough.”

She’s reaching out with a sharp stick into the sediment at the bottom of his thoughts, disturbing it. Previously disparate things begin to coalesce, a stirred up muddy puddle of images, resettling before he can see them clearly. Lewis in Kemp’s study, leaning his arm on the desk, slipping out of James’ reach. Lewis looking at James, extracting his promise. Lewis in the pub, obliquely, but thoroughly, interrogating James and making him think over what he’d done wrong at the climax of the case and wouldn’t do again. Lewis, sitting in sunlight at the pub table, alone, as James had left.

James folds his notebook carefully shut, as if to contain Mrs Thomas’ words for later, and puts it in his suit jacket pocket.

She seems to take this as a dismissal. She must be very used to people, to police officers, only listening to this in so far as politeness, or the potential relevance of her words, extends. She knows the cues. She gets up. “Would you like to see her room now?”

When she opens the bedroom door, James hopes, hard, that she doesn’t want them to comb it for clues. A fifteen year old shrine. But she holds the door open for them to step inside and glance around. “I should update it. I kept it the same for her you see. To come back to. And to show people what she was like, in case it’d help—although she’d have hated what happened. People searching out her secrets.”

She seems to want them to go after that.

Peterson pauses getting into the car and glances back at the closed front door, then looks over the roof of the car at James.

James pauses too, not having much choice in the matter. “They never do,” Peterson says. “Update things. I've been on cold cases twenty years on. They don’t update the rooms.”

James is preserving a whole flat. It’s different though. Lewis wasn’t taken against his will, exactly, but nor did he leave as much by choice as James knows Peterson, too, thinks Georgia did. It’s different.

Traffic is slow and they’ve managed to hit the start of the earlier Friday rush hour.

Peterson leans forward to turn up the radio as they halt at another red light. He glances sideways at James, as he straightens up. “And do you hear from Robert Lewis, Hathaway?”

James swallows. “Not…recently,” he says.

“Well. Here’s hoping he’s—anyway, give him—all of our best when you do.”

=

James is not surprised, after that, when he finds his own car has made its way to Lewis’ flat. When it was supposed to be taking James home. It’s developed a habit of doing that on the bad days.

He’s due a letter check, anyway, he tells himself.

He lets himself in and stows the post carefully in his coat pocket. Then he changes his mind about the whole thing and sheds his coat and jacket to find a haphazard home on the nearest armchair. Much as he used to shed, with relief, here the things from his day that weighed heavy on his shoulders.

He sticks the kettle on, largely in defiance of the quiet, and wanders while it takes its time heating. Lewis’ things continue to lie around in friendly fashion. Everything looks just the same.

This time, after Georgia Thomas’ room, that’s no longer comforting.

Venturing into Lewis’ bedroom makes it seem more like he’s not coming back. After a moment he kicks off his shoes and sinks down on the bed. When he lies down, the garden fence outside disappears below the horizon of the window sill, and the sky fills the windowframe.

He can see now why Lewis has positioned the bed a little off-centre in the room. James loves it when he catches sight of any whimsy surfacing in Lewis. He links his hands under his head and lies there, watching Lewis’ own particular patch of sky. He knows he’s lying on Lewis’ side because when he turns his head he can see the book Lewis left, splayed open, cracked spine and all, upside-down on his bedside table.

He’s had visions of losing Lewis before. He’d just never thought of living fighting against it like this, stuck in a tangled holding pattern with the loss of him, not knowing if he's really gone.

And he’s going along, doing fine, really, all things considered; and then something like today happens and breaks his rhythm.

It’s becoming more of an effort to get back on an even keel.

He gazes back up at the sky, which is doing interesting things with navy clouds, edge-lit by an unseen setting sun. Then he leans over and closes the book.

Maybe Lewis has disappeared into a Bermuda triangle. One made of old crimes and mistakes made that can’t ever be redeemed.

It's funny, though, how here in the flat, where Lewis is most obviously gone; here is where it always feels most peaceful. James could almost be crashing in the spare bedroom again, after too much alcohol, or human misery, or both, have deprived him of his ability to go home. Listening to Lewis in his kitchen, roaming, looking for a glass of water and muttering at his cat. He can practically see a Monty-imprinted dent on this duvet.

Because Monty, he has deduced, does sleep on this bed with Lewis. Despite all Lewis’ previous form for vague denials of James’ suspicions.

On that November night, when James had first taken Monty back to his own flat, Monty must have padded silently into James’ bedroom in the early hours. The first James had known of it had been a scratching sound at the side of his bed. For one horrifying moment he’d thought the spider of his not-solely-childhood nightmares had finally grown claws and come to claim him.

Then a weight had plumped down in the curve of his hip, and shifted a little, settling itself, as Monty had moved in for the night. James’ hand had made its way out from under the covers to lay on Monty’s fur. And as he’d begun to flex his fingers, in a motion that had relaxed him too, he’d felt the warmth of another living thing begin to seep through the covers, stilling his own restlessness and warming him in his bed.

During the day Monty removes himself from reach and still doesn’t deign to be stroked. But each night he returns as if sleeping on the bed is his birthright.

In the absence of Monty now, James fingers the edge of the beermat. His very own Eteocypriot inscription. It’s become a bookmark for the Poet of the Month in his pocket, the not-quite-pliable cardboard of it rubbing just as comfortingly against his upper thigh when he crouches down at crime scenes. It’s become softened and dogeared and worn just like his hopes.

But on some of the late evenings, when a midwinter night too close to Christmas had been closing in too fast, it had slipped from the book, in the quiet of his flat, as he’d emptied his pockets of the day. And it had made him remember autumn sunlight, through a pub window, like it was still a possibility after all.

He startles when the kettle clicks in the kitchen and stirs himself upright to head back in to it.

Which is why he’s in the kitchen when he hears the key in the front door.

He stands there, unmoving, as he listens to footsteps coming down the hallway. And he's still standing there as Laura appears in the doorway and stops short, clutching a hand to her chest. “Oh, James! God, you startled me!” She’s amused in her relief. “I should’ve guessed.”

But the cold has stilled all the air in his lungs again, the waters are closing overhead, blocking out the last of the dim light, and he can’t do anything but look at her.

She sobers abruptly. “You didn't know it was me," she says. "You thought I was Robbie.” Then she falls silent. She’s just watching him though. Not coming any nearer. Considering him.

She doesn’t take her eyes off him.

“James,” she says, carefully. “Do you want me to go?”

He finds he’s shaking his head.

She nods in return and makes a rueful little grimace. It’s the same familiar gesture she makes whenever they arrive at a crime scene, and there’s just not much to say.

It triggers a memory of that morning when Lewis was first gone. Laura, watching him carefully, trying to pick up on what was wrong. Not letting up on watching him until she could approach him when he was alone. It triggers an idea.

He turns away from her only to reach for the high cupboard above the fridge. And he finds his voice is willing to cooperate with him after all. “I know where he keeps the good stuff?”

=

Laura settles back on the couch beside him and props her stockinged feet against the edge of Lewis’ coffee table. Then she takes another, longer, sip and closes her eyes briefly. “So. When you said; _the good stuff_ …”

“Yes. It’s not just Talisker. It’s a thirty year old signature bottling.”

“It tastes like it.” She doesn’t seem very happy about that information. She’s giving her glass a baleful look.

“What?”

“The last time I was offered whisky in this flat,” she says, slowly, turning the look on James now, “he poured me a glass of Bushmills.”

 _“Did_ he?” James says, sympathetically. Or at least belatedly aiming for a sympathetic tone.

Her eyebrows lets him know he’s fooling no-one. “He did.”

“We keep it for certain nights, you see—after cases.” He’d had no idea that Lewis honoured that ritual enough to keep to it when James wasn’t here.

“You only drink this after you close a case?”

“We only drink this after we close an utter bastard of a case.”

“I see.”

“If we drank it after every case we closed it wouldn’t have lasted this long.”

“Now _that’s_ smug, Sergeant. There’s no need to highlight your case closure rate to me.” She takes another sip though. She certainly seems to be working on reconciling herself to it. “Oranges,” she says absently. “Where on earth did Robbie get this?”

“A grateful non-homicidal biochemistry professor whose protégé’s name we’d just cleared. Possibly the first non-homicidal academic we’d met in years.” Something worth celebrating in itself.

“And Jean let him keep it?”

“He—wore her down.” James grins to himself, remembering. It had been rather wonderful to watch.

“Always the way. The two of you get all the glory. D'you think anyone pops down to the morgue to thank the pathologist with a nice bottle of something?”

No, James does not. Who would want to seek out the person who'd cut the body of their loved one open on a table? Far better to have them faceless and nameless. Not that they'd be expecting Laura if they did try to imagine it. James certainly hadn't been, the first time they'd met.

“I found you a bit scary when I first started at the station,” he confides. His head tilts back against the couch as his body loosens. He’s starting to unfold a little with the spreading pleasure-burn of the whisky, the warmth of her beside him, and the sheer relief of not having to be so formal and monitored.

“Always such a shame when it doesn't last,” she murmurs.

“And then it turns out you and Lewis are friends. I was trying to get him to Innocent, you were all I needed. You can’t imagine how bloody difficult he made the simple task of just driving him to the nick.”

“I know. Imagine the poor bastards who had to lift him from the pub. You could almost feel sorry for them.”

“No,” says James firmly. “You could _not_.”

Laura eyes him then shakes her head. She pulls her feet up under her, nudging her shoulder into the back of Lewis' couch, shifting to face him.

“Don’t you have rehearsal this evening?” he asks, before he thinks better of it.

She rolls her eyes at him, just as she always does whenever he lets slip he’s remembered anything she’s said about her schedule.

“We don’t do it deliberately,” he defends himself. “Your social life is exhausting even to keep track of.”

“I can tell you how to solve that one.”

“I can’t just stop. It’s a reflex ingrained in us. We’re born detectives, you see. We deduce things. And Lewis is worse than me. How do you think he always manages to ambush you so successfully when he wants a consultation over his coffee?” Or bending her ear, as Lewis calls it.

He’s taken her by surprise, for once. Her forehead wrinkles, under her fringe. “He never said.”

And, come to think of it, he's not going to be overly impressed that James has. But Laura doesn’t seem annoyed.

“We just remember the things you tell us and discern patterns,” he says, getting as close as he can to explaining how it is. “It’s not like we know your actual whereabouts. More we remember where you’ve said you’re supposed to be.”

And after she'd been nearly buried alive, Lewis had sharply, anxiously, not let up at all for a while. It’d become a habit then for James too. Just keeping an eye. Not that he’d put it like that to Laura. Or tell her it’s a copper’s instinct when they’ve seen far too much in the course of the job. That some part of the mind, instructed more by the need for reassurance than anything more rational, automatically stores the information given by people who matter, and uses it as one way to check all is as it should be.

It’s the same instinct, James thinks, that makes Lewis take time to call his daughter whenever their cases hit their worst depths.

And in reality, James remembers Laura's orchestra schedule particularly easily since her alternate Fridays exactly match the schedule he has for rehearsal. Or he’d had. He’s lucky her mind doesn’t operate in the same way as his.

“Half our string section is missing in action with flu,” she tells him. “They called off this evening at the last minute.” She’s still looking thoughtful from his accidental admission of their protective instincts. It emboldens him enough to ask what he really wants to know.

“Why did you come here?”

“To contemplate my choices in life,” she says dryly. “Why do you? Actually, James, I thought that letters and plant watering were delegated to me. Since you have the cat.”

“I’ve no idea where that cat goes all day now. I kept him in for weeks at first.”

“Rough neighbourhood? Afraid he’d fall in with the wrong crowd?”

“You know where I live.”

“I do. I owned my first house pretty close to you.”

She did? James considers the house she now owns. Crikey. Maybe he should be looking closer to home for his occasional investigations of a first foot on the housing ladder. Much closer and twenty-odd years earlier. “I was afraid he’d try to get back here. He hasn’t settled that well. I think he blames me for Lewis being gone.”

She nods, gravely. “Shoot the messenger?”

“When the messenger has that carrier, it’s more like scratch the messenger.” He still has faint red lines running up his forearms from bringing Monty to his flat. He resists the urge to rub at them under his shirt sleeves, and his fist automatically migrates to his chest instead. “I’m sure he liked me better when I was just a temporary fixture around here.”

“And how, exactly, does one manage to be a temporary fixture?” Laura asks, after a moment. She’s not looking at him. She’s gazing past him out of the window, towards the garden, although there’s little left to be seen there now as proper darkness has nearly overcome the dusk. She’d sorted out Lewis’ lamps and put on his heating before they sat down, and that’s making it look all the more wintry outside.

“He was used to me appearing and reappearing here at odd times. He seemed to accept me when Lewis was here and even expect me after a bit. But now—I sense hostility.” In the daytime, anyway.

“Try feeding him fish and chips,” she advises, turning back to him. “That’s how Robbie won the way to his heart.” Her voice sharpens. “Why do you keep _doing_ that recently?”

“Doing what?” He realises he’s knuckling at his chest again, to ease the edges of the pressure there. He drops his hand.

“Have you been having chest pain?”

“No.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“Christ, I wouldn’t dare not. It’s not—it’s just a habit. It’s not a pain. Honestly.”  
  
It’s an empty sort of ache. But a colder, more internal one than muscles or tissue or anything physical she’s picturing. It’s not the first time he’s encountered it. It’s the resurfacing of an old familiar grief that was there long before he ever smoked his first cigarette. Recently it’s become a more constant companion again. That’s all.

“It’s not pain,” he reassures her.

Her eyes travel back and forth, scanning his face. She seems to recognise he’s telling the truth. “You are looking tired, though, James.”

“Miles to go before I sleep,” he tells her.

“Have you? Promises to keep, I’d bet then, too.”

“Yes,” he says, pleased. It’s not often anyone will play poets with him these days.

She holds up her glass as if to toast him. “Here’s one for you then: ‘The king of drinks, as I conceive it, Talisker, Isla, or Glenlivet.’”

“Is that Burns?” He’s not used to being outquoted on this couch. “Because if that’s Burns, you’re meant to do the accent.”

“Robert Louis,” she says, “Stephenson in this case. Although I’m sure his namesake would agree.” She takes another sip and lets her mouth grimace, then nods in agreement with the taste of it. “Possibly—” she inhales again “—more marmalade than oranges. We should be having smoked salmon with this—or char sui pork. Something piquant. It has that chilli catch in the finish.”

“But with coastal wafts right through it,” says James, not to be outdone. “And sweetness and smoke. I get dark chocolate and vanilla.” Although really what he gets, what he always gets from this particular bottle, is waves of its warmth.

“You’ll forgive me if I’m finding it hard to picture Robbie sitting here discussing coastal wafts.”

“I know,” says James, regretfully. “He growls a bit and says: ‘Settle down there, Sergeant, whisky tastes of peat.’”

Laura is clearly unimpressed by this.“Talisker is always coastal. There’s a smoky room, if they’ve let the fire die down at the end of the evening here, if you like. But the start of this one tastes as if they let the waves buffet the casks.”

“Ex _act_ ly. But he said that if I was under the impression I was sitting on a clifftop eating chocolate then he thought I’d had more than enough for one evening." 

Laura breaks into a laugh. When Laura is properly pleased by something, one side of her mouth moves into a smile sooner than the other, before he sees her eyes have already lit with warmth. Sometimes, seeing that happen unexpectedly, James can quite understand why Lewis likes to make her smile. Lewis would be pleased he'd managed it now, even in his absence. He'd get that gratified look of amusement that he likes to send right back at her.

What Lewis had gone on to say, that time, in his mock-despairing reproof, was  _It’s a decent dram, no more, no less._ He’d said in his best Robbie Burns. But it also turns out he’d kept the Talisker for drinking just with James. And James misses him so much it hurts.

He takes a strong swallow and battens down the hatch with it, although not before another unruly memory has slipped out. “Once, he made me an Irish coffee with it.”

“He did what?” Laura sounds genuinely appalled. “Oh, the two of you do not deserve to have this in your possession.”

“Just the once. The coffee was to counteract the alcohol.”

“You’d had a few measures before you began to believe that one, hadn’t you?”

That had been one of the times they’d fallen asleep on this couch. It had been a dull morning, and technically night had faded while they’d been confined in the art gallery apartment turned depressing crime scene. Finally emerging outside with Lewis to the street had done little to convince James that day had dawned or anything similarly redemptive was set to happen.

And Lewis had seen or heard something that James hadn’t intended to let escape, and he’d taken that half-joke of the _A_   _bit early for a pint, I suppose_  half-seriously.

“Come on, Boy Wonder, I’ll buy you a coffee.” Then getting into the car, en route, James had assumed, to the nearest early-opening greasy spoon, Lewis had instead delivered a satisfied double-tap to the car roof and looked over at him. “Think we can do better than that,” he’d pronounced. He hadn’t bothered to clarify that one, or speak again, come to think of it, until they’d landed up back here. James had judged it best to keep quiet and trust that something, anything, better might happen to him than landing up alone back in his silent, messy flat.

“There we are,” Lewis had said, when he’d placed the Talisker on his kitchen table. Continuing, as he often did, where he’d left off a while ago and expecting James to have followed his thinking down the same track. And then he’d started messing around with coffee.

Eventually, the torturous knots of thoughts and guilt that had been winding tightly, tugging James downwards, as happened so often in the sleep-deprived, overwired aftermath of a case—those knots had loosened, and James had drifted and floated more easily, loosened too, by the alcohol, the weariness and the feel of Lewis right beside him. He seems to remember Lewis dropping off first. Before James must have dozed off, following him into sleep, in the comfort of it all.  
  
He suddenly wants to slide his head against a warm firm-yielding shoulder. But not Laura’s small shoulder. He’d let it happen once with Lewis. Just once, late one night, under the guise of appearing more drunk than he was. Lewis had huffed in amusement and hadn’t moved until James had. If Lewis was here right now, James feels like he could manage it again and maybe not lift his head so soon this time.

Laura is still voicing her opinions on them wasting the Talisker in coffee and how they might as well have been given a bottle of Bushmills, perfectly adequate for their purposes.

“Lewis and I highly appreciate all your efforts,” he says, to mollify her, leaning down towards her to assure her earnestly. Because he couldn’t swear she didn’t just mutter something about pearls being cast before swine. “Highly.”

“ _Ef_ forts?” Well, that wasn’t the way to go. Her italics are as telling as Innocents. “I'll remember that next Christmas when you can go halves with him on a bottle of this and show your proper appreciation that way.”

James considers the bottle. The biochemistry professor had been a don of independent means.

“Not that highly,” he qualifies. The look she gives him makes him want to duck. “God, it’s such a relief to insult someone who actually grasps they’re being insulted.”

“Thank you,” she says, dubious. “Although I think you may be better off if some of your barbs go over Alan’s head.”

“Nothing goes over your head, does it? I mean—metaphorically. Lots of things do physically, I suppose.”

“Then again you probably manage to insult Alan without aiming to, at an educated guess. Was it Alan this week then?”

“Sorry?”

“Who had the pleasure of your company?”

He sighs. “Mainly Peterson. Although up till Tuesday it was Grainger. I’m like their jobshare.”

He’s an inspectorless sergeant. Innocent calls it being _a useful spare pair of hands_. James has learnt this means getting pulled in several conflicting directions simultaneously and inhabiting no one department easily. Initially, Grainger had taken the brunt of the ongoing investigations Lewis had left behind, which had meant James had been called upon by him more often than not. Apart from the cases where Innocent, surprisingly, had taken what leeway there was to stretch a grey area into a sergeant-run investigation, and she’d let James tackle the less visibly important ones himself.

Now anything unarguably above sergeant level which would have gone to Lewis, seems to get divvied up evenly between overstretched inspectors. And Innocent seems to be edging James more towards Peterson’s team. As if she has some sort of contingency plan that he could _usefully_ join organised crime longterm.

Peterson’s welcome has only increased James’ suspicions. Being tutored in the world of Oxford’s gangs, he’d felt like he was being exhaustively filled in on some huge revolving cast of a television show he’d accidentally pretended interest in.

“Soon get you up to speed,” Peterson had said. Clapping him on the shoulder.

The mere thought of it makes James feel tired. Everything currently seems to require far more energy than it has any business to. None of it feels like he's going to find a niche again. Standing at Peterson or Grainger’s shoulder, he feels no urge to protect. No urge for anything.

If any of the gangs Peterson seems intent on acquainting him with are the one of real interest to him, he’s never going to know. Peterson could be imparting inside knowledge on the people involved in the case that’s taken Lewis, and neither he nor James are going to recognise that knowledge for what it is. If Peterson had had the courtesy to come to Oxford a decade or so sooner, he could be casually questioned far more bloody usefully.

Laura shifts to catch his eye. She’s not letting this one go. “And should I ask how the week went?”

“Fine. He’s just preternaturally cheery. Peterson Naturally Cheery. That should be his name. Apart from when he’s being annoyingly earnest and understanding.”

Although—that wasn’t how he’d been with Mrs Thomas this afternoon. But there’s no need to hit Laura with the close to the bone revelations Peterson had illuminated for James in the driveway outside that house. Or the sharp dismay that had risen up in James. Laura comes here for some reason, after all. To Lewis’ flat, in Lewis’ absence. Even if she’s not admitting it.

“My word. He really can’t win with you, can he? He’s trying.”

“Now that’s _exactly_ what he is,” James says nodding. “Very trying."

She doesn’t laugh. Lewis would have. Monty would at least refrain from contradicting him. Laura just keeps on looking at him. Penetratingly.

It makes him reach restlessly for something closer to his real feelings. Because he’s aware he pushes his luck with Peterson. It would almost be a relief if Peterson did take exception now. Rather than keep so visibly, conscientiously, making allowances. The thought of Peterson making allowances for James because he thinks James’ inspector is seriously ill makes James feel ragingly helpless with nowhere clear to direct his feelings. “He could give up on the whole effort and be short-tempered sometimes. That’d feel more genuine.”

“Familiar is what you mean. It’d feel familiar to you. You’re just homesick for Robbie.”

“You can’t be homesick for a person,” James scoffs, after an astonished instant where he’d absorbed this, cleanly and wholly, right into that place inside him where the deepest truths lodge. Homesick is the only right word for how he feels, going about his disorienting days with the not-Lewis inspectors.

Laura still hasn't relaxed her gaze.

James casts his head back to examine Lewis’ ceiling and exhales. “Where do you think he is?”

“I like to picture him back in the BVI,” she says, surprising him. “In his shirt.”

“He doesn’t have it. He didn’t get to bring anything.”

“I know. Still hanging loudly in his wardrobe,” Laura agrees. “I can’t believe he’s kept that.”

He grins at her, pleased with the cheerful admission that she’s been snooping too.

“Although days like this, I think he’d better not be somewhere sunny,” she says darkly, casting another look out the window. It’s compIetely dark now. James gets up to coax the curtains closed, humouring them, by dint of muscle memory, over that odd kink in the curtain rail that Lewis constantly grumbles over and never gets round to doing anything about. “If I find out he’s propping up a beach bar somewhere exotic…” says Laura, watching him.

James isn’t minding the weather as much. He’s starting to feel better than he has since Innocent had led him into her office on the morning when everything first turned cold. His head is humming pleasantly as he resettles beside her; something late night radio. The rain has started pattering down amicably against the glass, hidden now. And he doesn’t have to go anywhere, or do anything, released from the strictures inside his own head by her company.

“Sometimes, though,” he ventures, “I wonder if he’s settled now. Wherever he is.” It’s the first time he’s put into words a fear that’s becoming harder to tamper down as the silent weeks go by. “If they’ve sent him back up North to blend in better, maybe he’s embraced his new life. Maybe it suits him. Maybe they've let him have an allotment.” And a retirement.

Although sometimes, in the odd half-awake dreams he’s been having, James pictures himself being Lewis’ to instruct in some entirely different life he’s now leading. Like helping him, on a freezing cold fishing boat in the foggy, churning waters of the Atlantic, to struggle against nature and the sea, and going back with him to their small stone cottage to work patiently, untangling the knots from snarled nets, in the evening, by the light of the fire.

He knows the prosaic truth of the matter is that Lewis is probably tucked away in the unremarkable suburb of an equally unremarkable town. But James is not wholly responsible for his more romantic, saltier visions. He’s at least slightly asleep at the time.

Laura glances at him. “He came back to Oxford before. When he’d a lot less reason to come back.”

“But sometimes he still doesn’t—fully inhabit his life here.”

She doesn’t tell him he’s hardly one to talk. She seems to know what he means. “Sometimes. But it’s not like when he first came back. It seemed like a toss of a coin then which way he’d go. He’s easy in his own skin again now. Anyway, settled? Robbie? Can’t you imagine what a nightmare he’s being, trying to solve the case himself? Driving them mad with further thoughts he’s had and advice for what they should check out next? They’ll be prioritising all available manpower to his case just to get shot of him as soon as humanly possible.”

James gives her a distracted grin, a reflex to shield his own pensive thoughts. He can see the attraction of being handed a new life. A fresh start.

“He did come back, before, you just remember that. And you didn't see him before he left.” Her eyes turn a darker blue.

He’s been getting some idea from the files. The morning after he’d learnt Lewis was gone, he’d found himself back in their office, early, staring across at the empty desk opposite. He’d stood up with no clear idea of what he was going to do, but once he’d reached Lewis’ chair, there was the small stack of files beside it, staring up at him from the floor.

He’s well used to Lewis’ habit of working over old cases. He’d noticed Lewis giving more time to the files over the last year or two. What he hadn’t known was that this was a very methodical project Lewis had embarked upon, that took as its starting point the first case in which Sergeant McLennan had been assigned to a newly-appointed Inspector Lewis. Further investigation had told James that Lewis had been quietly signing out half a dozen case files every few months since her death. Cold cases, yes. But closed cases too.

Lewis had been checking to see what else Ali McLennan had done on his watch.

Since this had very much met the track that James’ own thoughts about her were racing furiously along, he’d immediately taken ownership of both the files and the project.

It had made him wonder if Lewis, making follow-up calls years down the line, had accidentally lit the spark to a fuse-wire which had snaked its way right to this newly-informative criminal who’d reignited the whole case. James knows he'll never lay hands on that one file he most wants. And if investigating the wider net of Ali’s misdeeds gives him any concrete leads to Lewis’ disappearance, well, he’s not going to act on them. He swears to himself. On a regular basis. But he has a burning need to know anything that Lewis may have left for him to know.

He’s been getting absolutely nowhere. At least—in the sense of discovering anything that he’d set out to find.

At first, as he’d pored over them, Lewis’ matter-of-fact, wry observations had kept breaking through in his notes, lightening, for James, the heavy going of reading so meticulously through years-old human misery. James had remembered, from the resurrection of Chloe Brook’s case, how Lewis’ case notes simply ceased in that file on that December nineteenth. He’d been prepared for that as the files had begun to close in on the date.

What he hadn’t been prepared for was seeing, in black and white, how, when Lewis had returned to active duty weeks later, his words had become cuttingly brief and stark. The shock radiates off the page in those files. And after that, although Lewis’ name and his reports dutifully appear, they could be written by anyone. There’s no feel of Lewis to them. His observations seem to stop as if he’d just lost interest in other people. He disappears, and he doesn’t resurface.

James, for no reason he can put his finger on, has begun to wonder if the case that now matters so much is one that had happened within this time that Lewis was lost.

“I do know things were pretty—bad—before he went overseas,” he says. Laura seems lost in thought, as she watches the play of light on the shifting ambers in her glass. He watches her for a moment. “You’ve been his pathologist a long time.”

That rouses her. “ _Robbie’s_ pathologist?” she marvels. “And here I was thinking all along it was our National Health Service I was answerable to.”

“You know what I mean—you’ve both been involved with the same corpses for years.”

“On second thoughts; you’d have been better off not rephrasing that one. And yes and no. I had a few predecessors between the time Robbie came to Oxford and my start in this post.”

Come to think of it, Lewis has mentioned other names. But they’ve slid off the path James had been hoping she’d take. He knows full well it’s highly likely Laura would have been the pathologist involved in the case; her tenure definitely bridges it.  Even if it was one of those that had come up when she was on leave; she’d know about it. He can't, though, he really can't, give her even the sparse case details he'd had from Innocent, before Innocent's information blackout had descended—

“I suppose, though,” he tries again, “when you’ve been on the periphery of so many of his investigations… ”

Her expression takes sore exception to his phrasing once again. “A vital part of feeding clinically precise information into an investigation, _which_ it couldn’t get off the ground without, I think you mean.”

He should have tried this before starting on the Talisker. Alcohol never seems to dull Laura’s sharpness.

“That’s exactly what I meant. I suppose when you’re—what you just said—then you get a sense of what’s going on in a lot of cases. Even the parts of them you’re not directly involved in. You pick things up. Unofficially.”

He drops his head back against the top of the couch and gazes abstractedly at Lewis’ bookshelf, considering his next tack. So it’s a moment before he realises that she hasn’t responded.

“James,” comes her voice.

“Hmmm?”

When there’s nothing else forthcoming, he turns to look at her properly. Her eyes soften. “I don’t know anything, love.”

Oh. He lets his head fall back against the couch again. Laura watches him for a moment longer, and then she reaches to top up their glasses.

The rain dashes against the window. Lewis’ noisy fridge hums away in the kitchen. They’re the only sounds for a bit. Except for the faint rustle of that last hope of an autumn leaf, spiralling slowly down to join all the others. He takes a drink and then regards the bottle, concerned. “We’ve made quite a dent in it.” He’s not sure he wants Lewis to know they’ve been drinking it. It’s begun to feel almost like his wake.

“Apple juice,” says Laura, dismissive. “Or black tea. It’s strong enough to take it. I’ll doctor it. Seriously, James, were you never a teenager? Somewhere between being a scholar and a priest?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I’d be astonished,” she murmurs. Then she looks at him, her head moving to one side in a quick gesture. “Didn’t you think I’d tell you?” she asks. “If I did know something?”

He takes a moment to digest this. She expects him to trust she’d share with him, even though she knows he can’t, with any case-related details, return the favour. “Innocent might not have let you,” he says. He feels a disconcerting pull to justify his lack of faith because the directness of her gaze, and of her questions to him, are making him feel like he’s falling short of some standard she’s expecting between them.

“Jean,” says Laura briefly, “is not my boss.”

“There are days I wish she wasn’t mine. She thinks I risked his safety. Telling you.”

“You know you didn’t.”

And he has known that. All along he has. But it turns out he’s also needed to hear it. Someone to speak up over Innocent’s voice still playing in his mind.

“Jean should know you better than that,” Laura says, gentle now. He nods at her. “And besides, she should’ve been more mindful of her scripture.”

“Sorry?” he says blankly. Whatever about poetry, no-one James spends time with these days roots around in their childhood stores of knowledge to give biblical references. Aside from the murder suspects.

“I can imagine Jean back in Sunday School, can’t you? Serious and polite and relentlessly questioning the unfortunate teacher for evidence to back up all these theories before anyone devoted scarce departmental resources to following them. Solomon, wasn’t it?” She picks up her glass and angles it at him cheerfully.

“Solomon?”

“The one who went around threatening to bisect babies? Because you’d sooner lose Robbie yourself, and know him safe, than have him at risk of harm.”

There’s absolutely nothing to say to that. Laura’s certainties are like Lewis’ certainties. Her belief in him is firmly routing out that fear, still pushing coldly at the back of James’ mind, that he, less sure in own certainties, might have been motivated by pure selfishness in his conviction that Lewis shouldn’t have gone.

He releases a sigh and with it a little of that pressure in his chest that had first begun to build with Innocent’s accusation. The raw ragged edges of it have eased a bit. Laura’s words have blunted them. It does let him breathe better. He lets himself sink down a bit further on the couch.

The lines on Laura’s forehead deepen. “Just how bad are things with her?”

He shrugs. He thinks Innocent has forgiven him. She doesn’t hold grudges after all. She just shows no sign whatsoever of relenting on her updates embargo. And she frowns unhappily at James whenever he’s not tidied into a case.

“She looks at me like I’m something perplexing she can’t get crossed off her to-do list.”

“That’s not fair. She’ll just be concerned. And I doubt they cover this scenario much in management training seminars.”

“She knew late on the Friday night, and she waited all weekend to tell me he was gone.” He can still hear the bitterness as it emerges. “Deliberately, I think, so the trail went cold. She won’t even let me know if he’s—she said I’m too emotionally involved.”

“Well. We can hardly deny her that last one.”

He barely hears her. He’s working something out himself. “But I still think, telling you—” He still would, he realises. Innocent bedamned he would. If he knew Lewis was safe, if he knew he was—well, anything at all, really, he’d go to Laura, and he’d somehow let her know. Of course he would. He still can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s an enormous relief to have that straight in his own mind at last.

Although what he categorically would not do again is then dob himself in to Innocent.

“She just seemed so accepting of it. That morning, when she was telling me. Like she thought he’d made the right choice; leaving.”

“Yes,” says Laura, thoughtfully.

“What?” he says, suspicious, a cold, hard knot forming.

She takes in his wariness. “No, I have no idea if Robbie made the right choice. If it’s worth it for him. I doubt he knows himself yet. I was more thinking of you and Jean.” She twists her mouth at him. “Any chance you shot the messenger, James?”  
  
He’s about to protest, automatically, that it’s fairly natural to—when it occurs to him that Laura had in no way shot her messenger. She’d not even taken the safety off the gun. Laura had rested her hand on his arm and called him to check on him later, letting him take Monty.

She seems to take his disconcerted silence as consent. “If it’s any comfort, she was obviously unhappy with how she’d handled you too.”

“I don’t need handling.”

“Good God, the irony,” she mutters. “Okay, James, how she'd handled telling you. I’d have treated you like unexploded ordinance, personally, if I’d had to tell you Robbie was gone.”

Whatever Talisker-aided truths he manages to tell her, she’s going to effortlessly outdo him. She produces these statements one after the other as if she’s merely suggesting he hold the obvious up for consideration, like a taste note for the whisky in his glass.

“She’s shut me out of any updates,” he argues, after a confused moment. “Anything at all she gets to know.”

“Which, ironically, is because you updated me,” says Laura lightly. “It’s enough to make anyone feel persona non grata when it comes to Robbie’s life.” He stares at her. “Because I’m wondering why she didn’t tell me over the weekend? I was hardly going to go after him, was I? Before the trail went cold, as you put it.”

No. She wouldn’t have. He knows as he hears her say it that she wouldn't.

“Jean is highly pragmatic, and she didn’t feel the need to let me know about Robbie any sooner. I wasn’t a priority. ‘To see ourselves as others see us.’ Never mind, James. I become very partial to the Scottish poets when I have good whisky.”

It’s entirely unlike her to dissemble.

She sets her glass back down, ignoring its coaster. “Anyway, it’s been established that I’m not in a position to request or receive updates. Jean was quite clear about that. The particular ways in which I, and my relationship with Robbie, fall outside the specified remit. She was tactful, in the circumstances. Sympathetic even. But clear. Very clear.

There’s a note in her voice he’s unfamiliar with from her. He sends her a quick glance. “She probably wouldn't have been so—clear—with you if I hadn’t jumped the gun.”

“Possibly not. But that makes what she said no less true.”

He opens his mouth to say something reassuring and then shuts it again, caught in an inconvenient memory of Lewis looking at him, over the roof of his car, outside Professor Lipton’s house, at the close of that case. ‘Why don’t you invite Doctor Hobson,’ James had angled, as he sometimes did, watching for the response. ‘Get in there quickly before someone whisks her away.’ _Stuck in the past,_ is what Lewis had said. He hadn’t sounded inclined to do very much about that.

“I appreciated your telling me, James. Even if Jean doubtless begs to disagree.”

He damps his unease down with another swallow of whisky. “I’m not sure I did it to be considerate. The letting her know I’d told you bit, I mean.” He’d done that, he can now let himself see, in a helpless, frightened fury. Which was probably exactly how Innocent had perceived the entire episode. As pure defiance.

“And now she knows things you need to know. That’s not actually a personal failing on her part.”

James lets his head thud back against the couch.

Laura doesn’t seem to require any other response. “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” she says, meaningfully. “I’d put money on this being something from Robbie’s time with Morse. Bloody typical of him too. Unwittingly creating havoc from beyond the grave.”

Given how the ghost of Inspector Morse has poked at them over the years, impatiently fretting round the edges of James’ very first case with Lewis, shoving crossword clues into old files, and generally, peevishly, checking up on Lewis with his new partner—James can quite see where she’s coming from. Morse would have followed them to the pub for that very first pint too, James knows now. He was the one Lewis had been privately sharing a joke with, telling James he’d been put on orange juice. Never mind what he’d done when he’d turned up again, haunting their Wagernian bare-knuckle boxing Stasi case…

He sits up. “What have you been doing with his post?” he asks Laura.

“I stick them in that drawer.” She nods at the kitchen.

“Oh. I take them home.”

“To steam them open for clues?” She sounds nothing but interested.

“I’m not sure British Gas know where he is,” James says, regretful.

But he’s distracted by wondering if anything more promising has arrived under Laura’s watch. If James was in Lewis’ shoes and wanted to get a message to someone, just to let them know he was okay, he’d send something to his own flat. Something innocuous looking, even it were opened. But like Morse accidentally sending clues with his parsimonious lack of a stamp. Just—he knows he’d send something.

“Considering the lengths I have to go to, to prove my identity every time I call them, they really _should_ know—the top drawer,” Laura says, amused. She’s caught him eyeing it. “Well, go on then.”

Nothing. There’s nothing remotely possible-looking in the little stack of letters.

Laura has watched him absorb this, from the couch. "I suppose," she says, after a pause, "you’ve also been barred from contacting Lyn."

James refocuses on her. "Did Innocent tell you why?"

"Yes. Don't worry, James, I'm not about to risk jeopardizing Robbie’s contact with her."

"It’s just that he may even be getting to see her, sometimes, it depends what was agreed when he went, and if there was the slightest suggestion she was breaking the terms of it—it's not like they'd be keen to keep arranging it. It'll be hassle and a resources headache for them." And it must be a lifeline for Lewis. When James thinks of how Lewis' face opens out and softens into its own lines when Lyn calls; the way his voice is when he talks to her. 

He must sound more torn than he'd meant to, though, because Laura grimaces over at him, as he stands there, still in Lewis' kitchen. "Solomon," she reminds him, raising her glass as if she's drinking to the health of a Biblical king. He shakes his head. 

“We’re lucky we didn’t drown those plants,” she says, her eyes still inviting him to find something to hold onto.

James turns his attention, with an effort, to Lewis’ matching pair of plants, unexplained early Autumn additions to the kitchen worktop. James had wondered at the time if they'd been a gift, possibly from Laura. But if Lewis, instead, was making one of his sporadic efforts—had been making an effort—to settle in properly here, with more green growing things, then... “You can’t if you’re soaking them properly.”

“Soaking them?”

“That’s how you water houseplants in Winter. You pick them up, and if they feel too light you put them in the sink for a bit. Let them soak up water until they weigh heavy in your hand again.”

“You hang around here to wait for—” She stops. James feels his face heat. “Tell you what,” she says, casually. “One plant each. We’ll find out whose method is better.”

He doesn’t need to be humoured. “That’s just—”

“I’m thinking I’ll choose...”

“I’ll have this one on the right.” He lays his claim hurriedly. On the other hand, if they are doing this, it’s marginally taller. She can have shared custody of plants and letters no problem. Even part-shares in the Talisker. Just so long as she doesn’t get designs on Monty.

“I’ll warn you, Hathway, I am a gardener. Who knows how to water a houseplant without the aid of Google. And do boost the heating when you're here. Air the place out.”

“I do put it on for a bit sometimes. I don’t want him to come back, now it’s deep Winter, and find it cold. Not normal cold, when you know it’s chilly but you’ll warm up, that’ll happen. But I don’t want it to be properly, miserably bone-chilling cold for him.”

The lines on Laura's forehead are emerging from under her fringe again, as she considers him. This must be how her corpses feel as she quietly, relentlessly exhumes all their secrets. He’s vaguely aware he should feel more on guard. He does feel like a book she’s reading. But uncomfortable though it is, at times, this evening he’s also felt like he’s being properly seen for the first time since Lewis left.

“Are you hungry, James?” she asks.

“I really am,” he says, surprised. “There’s his local Chinese?” He’s missed Lewis’ local Chinese.

“Yes. We can but hope they survive in his absence. But you look like you could do with a proper square meal.”

“I’m—”

“Come on then,” she says, getting up. “Let’s move this party back to mine.”

“Are you offering to _cook_ for me, Doctor Hobson?”

“Well, not venison. I’m offering Friday night carbonara. But I might throw in some garlic bread if you’re lucky. I’ll rescue those plants from a watery grave while you call a taxi. James, where _are_ your shoes?” He watches as she screws the top back on the Talisker, only to slip it into her bag, and he’s not sure how he feels about that, _Mary Celeste_ as it is here or not.

“It needs to be doctored,” Laura reminds him, catching his look. “I’m thinking Lapsang Souchong ought to do it. Besides, I’d make a far better custodian for this than Robbie.”

She hasn’t recovered from the Irish coffee yet, it seems.

=

Dinner is as good as he should have known it would be. Laura, unbelievably, has switched to Chablis, on the basis that it goes best with the carbonara so it’s the chef’s prerogative 'to help gauge which flavours we’re trying to complement.' He needs to remember that one for some time when he's not given up trying to keep up with her. He's more tired and lightheaded from the last two months than he'd known.

He’d sat on one of her kitchen chairs and watched her cook, more playing with his own cool wine glass than drinking much of it. He’s still sitting there now because it turns out her policy of non-delegation at work firmly extends to her kitchen: “You’ve got no more chance of me letting you arrange my dishwasher then my medical bag. Stop looming over me and sit down.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a top-up?” she offers now, looking over her shoulder at him.

“There’s a saying about not mixing grain and grape.” And if he’d had a bit less grain, it would be easier to recall it. “D’you have any tonic water?”

“You’re looking for gin?”

“God, no. Just the tonic.”

She waves him in the direction of the fridge. Then she picks up the wine bottle for him to stow in there while he’s at it. It’s all very domestic, being in someone else’s kitchen, while the windows onto her dark back garden steam up gently, and her different choice of radio station murmurs away unnoticed in the background.

There are two bottles of Newcastle Brown nestled in the fridge door. Just sitting squatly there, waiting to ambush him.

Laura has caught the pause and looks past him at her open fridge. He knows, from when it’s his round at the pub with her and Lewis, that it isn’t a beer that suits her palate. She grimaces at him, and wears it lightly. “I’ll personally strangle him, you know, if he takes much longer about coming back,” she says.

Then she goes back to the attending to the saucepan she’s filling to soak.

James watches her sideways as he busies himself with the tonic and a glass. Sometimes those half-heard arrangements between Laura and Lewis are of her inviting him over for dinner. When she cooks for him, and he presumably watches like this and maybe doesn’t get to help with the dishwasher-loading either.

And then what happens, as far as James can hazard a guess, is that Lewis probably kisses her on the cheek, thanks her, and heads off home.

And yet she’s left these pieces of Lewis just sitting there, an everyday background presence. As if she, too, can’t quite bring herself to change the landscape he's disappeared from.  
  
James does have something he can offer her that he hasn’t shared yet. And after this evening it feels only fair.

“I didn’t tell you,” he says, “he left a sort of a note.”

Sometimes, mid case, when they’re struggling with the deceptions and crisscrossing motives of everyone they’re questioning, and they go to the morgue for a brief respite of more factual evidence, James wishes they could unleash Laura to get secrets from the living as well as the dead. The look she’s giving him now is reminding him why.

“No, I don’t mean—no information I haven’t told you. It doesn’t have any words.”

“A wordless note?” she says. Her look isn’t easing at all.

He gives up and tries to get Lewis to explain himself instead. “He left this.” He tugs the beermat out of the Tennyson in his trouser pocket and holds it out for her scrutiny. She looks at it and then at him, her eyebrows climbing. Then she turns off the tap and dries her hands.

“It’s from the pub,” he says, settling opposite her again at her table. “From that evening. He must’ve taken it when they took him, and they sent it back through Innocent.”

She draws it towards her and peers down at it. “But what is it? What do the marks mean?”

“Nothing. They’re just keeping score. He’s telling me I owe him a pint.”

“He’s telling you—well, with the two of you that’s code for allsorts anyway, isn’t it? Keeping score for what?”

“He was ticking off things he knew about me,” James says, briefly. Laura’s eyes flit down to all the marks. He thinks he can see where her mind is going. “He made some of them up,” he finds himself saying, defensively.

She almost smiles. “Of course,” she says. But she’s clearly not amused, not really. This isn’t going as he’d anticipated. Her kitchen light feels overly bright now, and he feels a ridiculous, belated urge to claim the beermat back.

“And here was me thinking,” she says, “that you and Robbie drank in stoical silence. This is what you both get up to on a normal evening down the pub?”

“Well. A normal evening doesn’t usually end with one of us going into witness protection.” But she’s too intent on this to be sidetracked. He tries again to explain how this was, against a further stirring of unease at her focusing her forensic attention on that last evening he’d had with Lewis. “You know how he is—he’s forever trying to work things out about people.”

“No,” says Laura, thoughtfully, looking at him. “I don’t find that at all, James.”

James, counter-argument at the ready, is stymied for a moment, recognising something in that. Okay, so Lewis doesn’t try to work Laura out. Not in the way he’s never ceased to size up James, impatient-curious and tolerant-curious by turns for the past few years, pushing at him restlessly. But then—“You’ve been friends for aeons.” He says it in comforting protest. But even as he says it, he knows it’s not hitting the right note.

Because she’s right. Lewis thoroughly enjoys Laura just as she is. He doesn’t seem to feel the need to spend any time figuring her out. The only time he looks at her, perplexed, is when she acts differently, like during that Franco debacle. Generally he looks at her with comfortable affection and amusement, like she’s exactly how he expects to find her and he’s damn fond of that and of her. He looks at James like James troubles him, and he wants James to provide the explanation as to exactly why that is. _In your own good time, Sergeant_.

James still can’t articulate to himself what the beermat game had really been about, so he has no hope of explaining any of it to Laura, even without all of this running through his head. Game doesn’t even seem the right word.

“He’d never have been allowed to write an actual note, you know,” he tries anyway. Because the person you go away for weekends to the Opera with is the person you leave the note for. Even the blokes who took Lewis could’ve told him that. It’s probably on the first page of the Debrett's of Witness Protection Etiquette. “What I mean is—they wouldn’t have passed on a note to anyone else. The only reason they agreed to this was that they’d seen us both with it before, when they were watching the pub. And because Lewis told them it was part of an ongoing investigation. Innocent said.”

“An ongoing investigation,” she repeats to herself.

“Well, that was just his cover.”

“The thing with Robbie is,” Laura says slowly, “is that he tends to mean exactly what he says. When he ever says it. He makes his words count.” This, too, is so accurate it robs James of any further argument he might put up. If this is an argument they’re having. That doesn't seem the right word either. “And this came through Jean?”

“Just about,” he says, wondering why that matters. “You could see she really wanted to send it off to Bletchley Park first.”

Laura might feel the same. She’s looking at the beermat as if trying to make it silently yield up all the things that Robbie Lewis doesn’t say. James could tell her that that doesn’t work. If he wasn’t so busy kicking himself. He hadn’t thought telling her would make her look like this. He’d thought, in so far as he’d thought about it before he’d yielded to the impulse, that it would ruefully entertain her. He’d wanted her to know that the signals from Lewis, as he’d left, hadn’t been distress flares. He hadn’t thought that she’d look so—

“It really was just because I was with him,” he says, carefully. “Just before.”

That’s what makes her look up at him properly again. “He had a moment, and he chose to do this, James. It’s that age-old question, isn’t it? What would you grab when your house is on fire? More of an instinct than a choice. And maybe, when it comes right down to it, what you choose isn’t always what you’d thought you would. Robbie had his moment, and this is what he chose to do. Well, that’s a good thing. He’s got every intention of coming back and he’s tried his best to tell you so.”

The emphasis on the 'you' is so light it barely touches the word. He could conceivably not have heard it.

He moves restlessly. “But I’m not sure it was like that. So sudden for him, I mean. I think he already knew something could happen. I’m not sure that I didn’t miss something that last day. He was odd that morning. Stressed. When you saw him, was he odd with you?”

“When do you mean?

“That afternoon.”

“I didn’t see Robbie on the day he left. You came by yourself for your Agatha moment.” She sees his bewilderment. “To tell me the case had been solved.”

“Oh. Yes. But he’d gone off somewhere, and later he’d calmed down, and usually that’s because he’s taken himself off and talked to you."

“No. How do you mean stressed?”

“Earlier that day. He got het up. He made me—”

But he runs aground. When it comes right down it, and he’s about to form the words, the sharp tug of wariness about telling her this tells him it had been something. That moment with Lewis in Kemp’s study. Something light and fragile that they’d have brushed aside, as always, if Lewis hadn’t gone. And he could tell himself it’s been given more weight just because they haven’t had the time to do that. But he’s having it brought painfully home to him now, finally facing up to the memory of it at Laura’s kitchen table, that he'd known even at the time and done his best to dismiss it. He’d known it in those extra heartbeats before he’d gathered his wits to follow Lewis down the stairs.

“He said I wasn’t to go off following hunches without calling for backup any more,” he says briefly, to Laura. “He made me give my word.”

“Well, then. You really do have promises to keep. You think he knew that he might not be around any more as your backup? He needed to stop you being so cavalier about your own safety?”

"Cavalier—No, I don’t mean it was as simple as that. Maybe he just had an inkling that something was coming to a head on this case.” Even as he struggles to articulate it, he’s starting to doubt it. Because, surely, if Lewis had had an idea this could happen, he would’ve—well, what would Lewis do if he'd been feeling under threat of having his life upended? Probably get on with things in defiance of it all. Go for a pint, most likely. James despairs.

“Maybe,” says Laura, “for Robbie it is. That simple.” And she gets up with the type of finality Lewis also brings to his gestures and goes to switch her kettle on. “Tea?” she asks and starts getting mugs down without waiting for an answer.

But it really hasn’t helped, telling her this. This is far too complex terrain and he’s unsure how to find his way across it. He generally just circles the foothills. He’s completely unused to exposing things that are so personal and unformed into words, even within his own mind, to a mercilessly practical gaze like Laura’s.

“Equally, James,” Laura is saying. “The man had a point. You find out one of your suspects is turning out to be more than a theory. You’ve got trained manpower to summon for backup, the technology to do it and the wherewithal to know when you should. And despite all that, when you’re closing in on one of your leads, you act like your average lost bloke who won’t stop the car and ask for directions.”

“He’s worse than me,” James says, from a distance underwater. “You’ve no idea how I have to keep an eye on him on cases. He’ll be terrible now with no-one to—” Lewis, with no back-up now, no-one to call to his side, trying to work this case out as, of course, Laura is right in what she'd said earlier, of course he will be, and following his own leads—

“James,” Laura’s voice comes closer again, sharpens. “ _James._ Listen to me. He’s got a whole liaison team watching him, reigning him in, having his back. From what I’ve gathered about how these things work. Hasn’t he?”

“Yes. But it’s not exactly like that. And you know how he is. He's—”

“How does it work, then?” Laura persists. “Tell me.”

Sometime during his explanation, he starts thumbing at the cigarette packet in his pocket and moves his head enquiringly towards her back garden. It’s pretty much stopped raining. Laura nods. So he continues from outside, leaning against the wall, looking back in at her in her lighted kitchen. Talking to her about the mechanisms there are to keep people safe in this situation. To keep Lewis safe.

After a bit, she joins him and leaves his mug on her patio table, waiting for him. “If I tell you I want one of those, don’t listen to me,” she says, nodding at his cigarette. When he finds he can grin at her, she seems to take it as a sign to reengage in the conversation. “So when he went. Would they have let him consult Jean?”

“I don’t know,” James says, slowly. He doesn’t. But he’s struck by what she means. He sees again Innocent’s drawn look that Monday morning that he hadn’t wanted to go near. That odd flinch. “They probably would’ve let him if he’d wanted to.”

But Lewis wouldn’t have done it. Innocent would very much want to believe that any of her people would feel they could come to her in that situation. And Lewis would see it as a matter to make up his own mind on. Nothing personal. He’d probably dismiss the idea Innocent would even mind. “It wouldn’t occur to him. He wouldn’t have thought about how much his welfare matters to her.”

“How much the welfare of _all_ her officers matters to her,” Laura says, pointedly. “I think she feels it. Whether or not it’s rational. That she’s failed to protect one of her own.” She seems determined to make him see Innocent’s side in every aspect of things tonight. Oddly, given the almost-bitterness in her voice earlier, when she’d been relating what Innocent had said to her, about her relationship with Lewis.

He looks at her, nursing her own mug of tea in both hands, for warmth, but not retreating inside yet, staring off down her garden in the dark.

And it strikes him with the clarity of the gently freezing air.

Laura is not annoyed at Innocent. At Innocent’s view on Lewis’ relationship with Laura not being—enough. Laura hasn’t said anything to suggest she thinks Innocent is wrong. Nor is Laura annoyed at James himself, for being the one who Lewis left a note for when he’s failed to leave one for her. What’s bothering Laura is how things are with her and Lewis. She’s frustrated with Lewis.

And yet she’d gone to Lewis’ flat tonight, at the end of her long week, months on from his disappearance, obviously seeking something from that. And had accommodated James’ presence there as if it was only to be expected, taken him home and fed him, and is even now, he knows, letting him get himself back on solid ground by distracting him with practicalities.

He draws on his cigarette and frowns at her, as he rummages in his mental store of knowledge for what he has to give her this time, that will be more for her than the beermat had turned out to be, and he comes up with one of the guys in the band. Because it isn’t only the Talisker, nor being cooked for, nor even being here in her home, that has let him move more easily this evening, under the weight of the things he carries now. Something a little like sunlight has spread throughout him, warming and softening the emptier places inside.

“The stars look very cold about the sky,” he tells her.

She turns an absent-minded glare on him. “Oh, don't you start—how many times d’you think I've had a tipsy arts academic thinking they're original and quoting the _lovely Laura_ bit of that one at me?” James decides not to mention that even Innocent has failed to resist that one. “If you and Robbie didn’t insist on sneaking away from my parties and arresting my neighbours, I’d still be at risk of it on a random Tuesday morning, putting the bins out.”

That’s right. He glances at her swing; moving gently, emptily, in the breeze. And then back at her again, unsure. “And I have many miles on foot to fare. Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,” he says.

“Keen fitful gusts are whispering to and fro in my back garden, are they, James?” But one side of her mouth is quirking at him in an acknowledgement, a shadow of amusement. “You’re impossible," she says. “Do you know that?” And she takes his arm and gives it a bit of a shake.

“If I don't, it’s certainly not for want of telling,” James agrees.

He hopes that she sees, though, that really he means to tell her the bit of the poem about the type of warmth this evening has been, tempering the bleakness in its afterglow. How he’s been left ‘brimfull of the friendship’ he has found.

As he glances down at her, he finds he's watching one of her proper smiles starting up at him now _,_  even as she shakes her head at him, so he thinks she might just understand the things he doesn't say. He really hopes she does. She's had years of practice, too, after all, deciphering all the things that aren't said.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

It’s an early sharp dark spring. Not a snowy evening, but Innocent has stopped by the office anyway. She’s currently watching him, pensive, while they ostensibly deal with a minor update on an equally minor case. Not one that merits shutting his door for, as she has. James is about as clear as Frost’s horse as to what’s really on her mind, but he’s in no doubt he’ll get to know shortly.

Things have been cautiously better with her since the night he’d heard Laura’s key in Lewis’ lock. Somehow, the realisation that Innocent could have minded Lewis not turning to her, when it came right down to it, has drained all the heft out of his anger at her. But he holds little hope of this being about Lewis.

They’ve reached a pause now. She leans back, almost-sitting on the edge of Lewis’ desk, her hands resting on either side of her. He stays in his desk chair, unused to looking up at her from this angle.

She smiles at him. “You did well connecting the dots on the Fallon case.”

He tries to look appreciative and wait her out. 

“You’ve been getting good results on one or two things, recently. And you’ve certainly been putting in the work. And the hours.” She stops and twists one side of her mouth at him. The look in her eyes is tipping over into concern. “Rather long hours. James—”

He reaches hurriedly for a dose of formality to ward this off. “Actually, ma’am, I was just finishing up for the evening—”

“Were you?” she asks.

Not for the first time, it occurs to him that he’d never want to be on the buisness end of an interrogation from her.

“As I was saying: the Fallon case. It was appreciated that you did call for backup when you got a sense that one of your wild goose chases was about to come to a head.”

Well reasoned theories, substitutes James silently, coming to fruition.

“Although—it would have been even more appreciated,” Innocent says wryly, “by Inspector Grainger, in particular, if you’d seen fit to let him in on your thinking at an earlier stage in the case.”

James tries to look as if he’s taking this on board. He really doesn’t need this week’s lesson as imparted by Innocent. He’s already come to his own conclusion on this week’s lesson: there are worse things than working on a case run by Peterson or Grainger. One of them is working on a case run jointly by Peterson and Grainger.

“Nor did you do too badly yesterday evening. I know these things aren’t easy your first time out.”

Now  _that_  had been an occasion to reluctantly appreciate Alan Peterson. If you were firmly sidestepped into a press conference at the eleventh hour, you could do far worse than find yourself sitting beside him. James had only had to answer the odd straightforward question when Peterson, gravely mindful of demonstrating teamwork, had turned to him for the expected answer.

Innocent sends him a complicit smile, cheerfully ignoring now, as she had then, his secret indignation at being ambushed like that. “Not quite as dramatic as your last television appearance. But when it comes to press conferences, that’s a good thing.”

_Best telly in years._  The sun-warmed metal of the car bonnet making it feel almost soft. Lewis, with a grass stem peaceably between his teeth, and James sitting upright in a bright glare of sun and motion, only to settle beside him again, glancing over at him. ‘Ever appeal to you, the actiony side of things?’

‘Ran a bit as a young copper. Shouted ‘ _Oi, you._ ’ Sometimes, quite loudly. Usually did the trick.’ James stretches his neck into the sun, blinks, and meets the shock of Innocent’s frowning look instead. She’s staring at him, eyebrows descended. He stares back at her for a beat and then hurriedly straightens up. He seems to have missed a bit.

“As I was saying. Learning to collaborate more effectively with your fellow officers is an area where you’ll agree there’s still room for growth.” She has a way of delivering these things in a tone so reasonable that it’s like being simultaneously stung and having the no-fuss antidote applied, leaving no grounds for objection.

And now James sees where this is going.

She’s about to put him on the prep work for Peterson’s next big drugs raid, which looks set to consume any amount of mundane man hours over the next God-knows-how-many exhausting months. And apparently it’ll also remedy James’ deficiencies in teamwork skills while they’re all at it.

“We’ve had funding approved for an inspector’s post,” she says, confusing him, so that it takes a moment to process. “It’s safe to say you’d be one of the most qualified candidates…”

“No,” he says flatly.

“Now let’s not be too hasty. It’s not Inspector’s Lewis’ post. We've been trying to get funding for an additional one for quite some time.”

He does know that. Lewis had mentioned it. Casually. Once or three times at last count.

“Look—I rather thought that your views on moving on from the sergeant role might have undergone a change, what with Lewis being, for now, out of the picture—” She stops herself. “Except he’s not for you, is he?” she says slowly.

He looks blankly at her, doing his level best to convey having no idea what she means.

“You’re not going to consider this, are you?” She shakes her head and glances round the office. “In that case—and don’t read too much into this, James—but I’m afraid I’m going to have to evict you.”

He frowns, genuinely flummoxed this time.

“I'm sorry. Real estate is at a premium and we need—”

He stops listening again. Because of course. He should have thought of this before. Of course. He glances out at the squad room in despair, at its noise and its clutter.

She’s followed his focus. “No, I don’t want to demote you back to a desk, so to speak. And nor am I willing to allocate you as a junior to one of your recent peers…” She gazes at him, and he’s fairly sure she doesn’t mean the look of mild despair she’s giving him to be so evident. James gazes back, at one with her on this. He can see how that would have the potential to go wrong fairly rapidly too. It’s not like he knows what to do with the dilemma he presents her with. Floating him between two of the more established inspectors of the nick was only ever meant to be a stopgap measure, he’d very much assumed. It’s hardly been even a qualified success. 

She taps a finger slowly on Lewis’ desk. “There is a project in the pipeline that needs the sole attention of one officer.” She sounds strangely reluctant. “Perhaps something you can apply that intellect of yours to.”

The sheer relief at the thought of being able to work alone takes him aback, making him giddy. “That sounds a  _fascinating_  topic,” he says promptly. “Absolutely my area of expertise.”

Innocent rolls her eyes at him but concedes a look of amusement. “The new lead you spotted on that cold case, recently—it’s looking very promising.” That had been an unanticipated side-effect of his study of Lewis’ files; spotting references to old stored evidence which could now be usefully subjected to new forensics. Her look sharpens. “Can I assume that your interest in that particular file came from the case being previously discussed with you, here in this office? Rather than it being one that Sergeant McLennan was active on?”

He nods, obediently. Because, in all fairness, she can assume whatever she wants.

“And we are—still behind in our cold case rates.” It visibly galls her to say this. “Which apparently overshadows the many ways in which we  _more_  than hold our own on current case closures against stations with  _far_  less demands on their resources.”

James bites back a smile.

“Yes. Well, there’s a new system I want to pilot. I need an overview of how our updated forensics, and knowledge, can be targeted most effectively on the backlog of cold cases to yield new results—we need to develop an efficient system. You would audit the files from one particular year with that in mind, and you can see what you turn up in the way of leads in the process.”

She’s formalising his case file studies. Although—she can’t possibly have worked out what he’s been doing, can she? It would be just like her to firmly steer him off in another direction, even while capitalising on his newly-honed case analysis skills. All for the good of the quarterly statistics. Innocent never aims to kill two birds with one stone when she can effortlessly take out a whole flock.

“Half your time will be allocated to this on a trial basis. We’ll reconsider how far the project can be extended after three months. Which means you’ll need to balance a split post until then. Which does not mean longer hours, Sergeant. Law of diminishing returns.” She’s still looking uncharacteristically torn. “You know, Occupational Health can really be a very useful resource—”

Occupational Health? His hours are not a matter of workplace stress. “And the other half of the time,” he cuts in, to get her back on track. “Ma’am?”

She gives a sigh. “All right. Half your time allocated to this—as a trial run. And the other half, you’ll still be at the disposal of Inspector Peterson’s and Inspector Grainger’s needs.”

He suppresses a sigh of his own. But he’s too busy contemplating this new direction to care overly much. It’s a moment before he realises she hasn't ceased considering him.

“Do you know what the problem is here, James?”

He glances up at her quickly. There are surely too many options and no need to supply her with ammunition. Better to look curious and let her take that as a cue to elaborate as she obviously wants to.

“It’s that you’ve outgrown sergeant status,” she says, wrongfooting him once again. “It’s a problem partly created by your own level of experience. A few years ago, you would have coped with being put with any inspector in this station—well, maybe not coped but kept your opinions to yourself and performed very well while being very dissatisfied. Wouldn’t you?”

She looks at him in a way that makes him wonder exactly how much she’d figured out about his time with Knox, after the event.

“It wasn’t so obvious while Inspector Lewis was here because Lewis—power differentials didn’t come into it terribly much, did they?”

“I do the same routine tasks as every other sergeant.”

“Yes, but you’re aware of what I mean. You’re used to being listened to, your opinion seen as equal. Lewis felt you’d earned that.” James falls silent, taking a surprised look at the difficulties of the past few months from this perspective. “So don’t dismiss going for promotion out of hand, would you? It’ll be some time before we can advertise the post. And in the meantime—you’re familiar with the overflow file area on the second floor landing. We’ll be creating a more contained multipurpose mezzanine space.”

It takes a moment to translate that she means she’s having a door put on the odd alcove near the back stairs. There’s a big window there. He can see how that would be—sort of. It’ll still be a sight better than the squadroom.

And yet his eyes flit, of their own accord, over to the silent other side of the office, behind her. When he refocuses on Innocent, she’s just watching him. She meets his eyes. Sometimes there’ll be these odd moments when the reality of what’s happened lies right there between them. In one way, interacting with her now can be an odd sort of respite. At least with her, unlike with every other officer in the station, he doesn’t have to keep up the pretence about Lewis’ absence.

And yet she tells him nothing. And maybe there’s nothing to tell. But it’d be something even to hear her say that, to know the embargo has been lifted so that if anything—

“I can arrange,” she says, delicately, indicating the shelf unit behind Lewis’ desk, where Lewis keeps, amongst other things, that framed photograph of himself and his wife, “for someone to…”

“No,” James says, quickly filling the pause. “I can.”

That seems to be all she needs. She straightens up to detach herself from the desk.

He has a moment to wonder at the way she’s approached this. He’s left feeling he’s been sort of consulted. As if there was some decision being made he isn’t fully aware of. He only has a moment to wonder at that before he sees that she’s peering, unfocused, at his shoulder.

He stares back at her, unable to catch her gaze, unnerved.

Then she reaches towards him, plucks something from his suit jacket and nods at him. Approvingly. Oh Lord.

He’d been thinking about one of Lewis and Ali’s cold cases all the way home last night, and had flung himself down on the couch to root in the file as soon as he’d got in. Monty, after a bit of winding round his feet, had projected himself to the top of the couch, where he likes to lie, and then settled himself down onto James shoulders. A very heavy scarf, that had vibrated with the purring.

James, beyond reaching up to give him the odd abstracted neck ruffle to return the favour, had given it no further thought when pulling the suit jacket back on this morning. Now that’s been there all day. Again. 

Innocent dusts the hair neatly off her hands, into his wastepaper basket, and gives her original plan one last shot. “You could make this so much easier all round if you’d only agree to—”

“But when have I ever done that,” James says, risking ducking his head and looking up at her from under lowered brows, to exit from the situation.

“I obviously left you too long with him,” she mutters as she turns to go. “You used to be quite biddable when you started here.”

Biddable, James thinks. Before Lewis, in the Knox era. Biddable and painfully miserable. He’s leaning back in his chair when he realises she’s paused in the doorway. “Don’t get too used to working alone, will you, James?”

And she’s gone before he can think of a response.

It really is only a room. Four walls if you can call them that, plasterboard and glass. Barely what constitutes a room in any proper architectural sense. One of the walls is an internal window.

And he’s tired, very tired, of what it does to his traitorous mind, of his heart kicking in his chest, every time he catches a glimpse through the blinds of a broad-shouldered male in shirt sleeves standing studying an incident board.

It’s Patrick Kavanagh grieving and having that no-warning tide of loss suddenly rise up in his October-coloured weather, coming across his father everywhere he now isn’t.

He's had more than enough of the squadroom and its deceptions. A car park view will suit him just fine.

He looks out at Innocent, targeting a nervous constable who’s next on her kindly-brisk hitlist. The constable is too new to know just how nervous he should be.

And James doesn't want any of the ways Innocent is trying to offer him to stay here in his own right. Everything is on hold these days, and it’s impossible to make decisions. But this one is entirely simple. He’s Lewis’ sergeant. He’d asked to be given that job, and he can’t leave it while Lewis isn’t here. Lewis hasn't willingly left their partnership, so James can’t dissolve it in his absence.

It’s sinking in now exactly what Innocent has done. Diplomatically, tactfully and so very definately.

But, he argues desperately to himself, she runs her station like a Grandmistress, surveying all the pieces on her chessboard, on any day of the week so it’s impossible to know if her making these decisions—about what to do on a more permanent basis with Lewis’ office, his personal effects, his sergeant—is triggered by any change in her expectation that Lewis will come back.

_Don’t read too much into this, James._

He’ll need to warn Laura, so she doesn’t come across a box of Lewis’ work things appearing in his flat. He knows she still goes there because her pile of letters in the kitchen drawer continues to grow, and, more worryingly, so does her plant, coming from behind and effortlessly outstripping his every time he thinks he’s just getting somewhere with it. She’d left a helpful little tape measurer on Lewis’ kitchen worktop recently. He’s begun to research Miracle-Gro.

In retrospect he can see how it must look to—well, there are new recruits who hadn’t even started when Lewis left. He wonders what explanation they were given. Two names on a door and only ever the sergeant. He feels foolish now. He’s more of a noticeable square peg than ever without Lewis standing shoulder to shoulder with him. Rubbing the edges off.

Laura would probably tell him that he’s lucky Innocent is trying to create a square hole for him then.

Innocent is finished in the squad room and gives a knock on his open door. “Didn’t you say you were leaving?”

Which is how he finds himself ejected from the station far too early of an evening.

And yet, when he reaches his flat, he finds himself sitting in the car outside it. He’s sometimes suddenly taken by tiredness recently. He knows full well the long hours haven’t been helping matters.

But it’s a clear night. Monty will be busy with his own evening concerns and won’t be looking to come in for a while.

James locks the car and pushes his hands deeper into his coat pockets, in lieu of the gloves he should probably get. But he can’t face going in just yet. He’s hungry and he has a better plan.

=

When he opens the door to the restaurant he pauses, as the welcoming noise and light come out to meet him. The chill in the air has made the thought of hot food and cold beer very appealing.

He wants heat. He wants to be warmed from the inside out and he wants it to be instant. He’s making his way over to the counter to put in his order when he sees her, and for a moment, in his surprise and relief, he thinks he’s conjured her up. Before he processes that Laura’s not alone. She’s with a bloke James has seen somewhere before.

He stares at them, safely enough when they’re so absorbed in their own conversation, and feels an odd disorientation as he’s mentally transported back in time. Because he’s somehow staring at an exact copy of a picture he first saw in this same restaurant. Darkly, through a looking glass.

Laura and her Spainish-named German ex-boyfriend. Two years later. Even harder to get his head around.

He wheels around and straight into a polite disturbance of his own making as he collides with a party of four coming in. They all make their very English apologies. He’s not sure his apologies are up to much, but it certainly hampers his escape. He’s barely made it a moment away, the door has barely swung shut behind him, when he hears it open again; the restaurant noise swelling out once more to warm the sharper traffic noises of the street. He comes to a halt without turning around.

That doesn’t deter Laura who just cuts in front of him.

“We must stop meeting like this,” she says. But she’s not really looking amused.

“What are you doing?” he asks. As a conversational opener, it’s not a good one. And his tone hasn’t helped, he can see that in her expression. But he’s had more than enough of today already, and he finds he doesn’t quite care.

“Having dinner,” she says briefly. “Although I can’t say I was looking for a repeat performance of this either.” If that’s an attempt at lightening things, it doesn’t work. Quite the opposite.

He sees her rueful grimace fade, and a frown forms at him instead. “James, are you okay? What’s wrong with you? I know this is difficult but… ” And her hand is on his arm. Just like at the beginning of this. When she'd needed to believe as much as he did that Lewis would be returning.

“Why did you come back here?” he says, bewildered, “did you almost want to get caught?”

Her hand slips off his arm. “Caught?”

“Seen,” he says, dismissing this. “Why would you come here again? It’s my local.”

“It’s one you barely frequent if that’s true. We used to come here long before it was done up and the rest of Oxford discovered it. We used to own a house near here, I told you that.” And her eyes drift back towards the restaurant.

So James could have saved himself from this conversation, if he’d been properly alert when he arrived, because there’s Franco sitting clearly visible at their lighted window table.

But there had been no ‘we used to' in that house-owning statement the first time around. He hasn’t got the space in his mind to process why she may be reclaiming a shared history with Franco. ‘He’s an ex of her’s,’ Lewis had said briefly, back then. James had assumed a far more casual past relationship. Had Lewis known it wasn’t? Maybe it hadn’t mattered. Because James had certainly had the impression that Laura’s reunion with Franco had been a one-off, regardless. Lewis certainly had. God, he’d be—

“How come I come across you every bloody time—”

“You don’t,” says Laura, looking straight at him. “Not by any means.”

“ I—” James stops as it starts to dawn on him that this isn’t some hideous coincidence the universe has perpetrated on him to top off his week. “This has been going on since Lewis left?”

“No—”

“Well then—”

“—since before he left.”

He stares at her. Her gaze doesn’t falter at all. And at that, the anger starts to seep properly through the shock of this. “Well, I’m sure he’d understand you can’t put your life on hold,” he says stiffly, making an effort that feels like a physical one. “When we don’t know if he’ll be back.”

There’s a tight press of her lips before she speaks. “Stop that, James. You know that’s not it. This isn’t—your losing Robbie—it’s not on me.”

He looks down the street, over her head, with the lights of its frustrated stop-start traffic noisily making its way past. The breeze catches at them both.

Her tone softens and pulls at his attention. “Look, whatever part you have me cast in, I’m not the faithful Penelope weaving patiently at her loom and waiting for him to battle demons and return to me.” Under other circumstances the idea of Lewis as Odysseus, battling his inner demons to defeat the outer ones on his quest, would completely charm James. As would her offering that to him. He doesn’t even engage with the idea.

“But behind his back? How can you?”

“You think this is some of betrayal? Can you tell me of what, exactly? Because I’d love to know.”

It’s a bit much asking him questions neither of them seem able to answer. The closest James had been able to get to it, when this had happened last time, was that she and Lewis had both been acting like she’d cheated. On what it was harder to say—on the emotional affair they’ve been having for years, maybe.

He looks at her, at a frustrated loss, but unwilling to concede her point. He’s far too het up for that. She looks like she could nearly match him in the frustration stakes. She also, he takes in for the first time, looks both rather nice, the way she’s dressed, and, equally, not remotely dressed for the weather and rather chilly. “D’you want my coat?” he offers abruptly. There’s no reason for her to freeze while she’s insisting on arguing with him. She shakes her head at him in despair.

“I thought you’d sorted this out with him,” he says. “That you’d talked about it and then—”

She looks weary. “And then, James, absolutely bloody nothing changed. And I ran into Franco, months later, at a talk, one that Robbie, incidentally, made his excuses not to attend, and we went for a drink. We move in the same circles whenever he’s over here. We run into each other. The last few months that happens—not so accidentally.”

The last few months. Of all the feelings struggling within him, hurt, bizarrely, pulls strongest. She’d known this the night of the Talisker. For a moment he forgets what she’s doing to Lewis while he’s gone. “You never said. That night. You said—” He’s reaching after the whole conversation in his mind.

She looks at him, hard. “I suppose,” she says, slowly, “that it was after our conversation that night that things began to take a less casual turn with Franco.”

He shies away from the idea of him having made things any worse. Innocent was the one who'd put things overly clearly, and had bruised her at the start of it all, months before they’d talked. But it’s more difficult to fight off the fact that there’d been something like this hovering in their whole conversation.

She grimaces at his silence. “I can’t think now why I thought it might not go down too well. My mistake.” She’s trying again to invite him to share some humour to lighten this.

“Well, it’s none of my business of course,” he says, retreating.

And this is what makes her abandon her efforts to be reasonable. He sees the moment when she starts to lose hold of her temper right back. “Don’t do that. D’you think I’d have felt any differently if he’d left a note that said ‘wait for me?’”

James swallows. “No,” he says, unsure if she means—but she’s focused on her own unstoppable train of thought now.

“Because believe me, that wouldn’t have been any different to normal proceedings either. He left. He chose to leave. It changes things. It has to. He’s not here and we are.”

“He didn’t have a choice. Not the way you’re saying.”

For a moment she doesn’t respond, just considers him with that searching gaze. “You are allowed to get angry at him.”

“Why would I?”

“Because it might spread it around a bit and save the rest of us.”

“It's not his fault he’s gone.”

“Well it’s certainly not mine. Nor yours. Nor Jean's. Nor Alan Peterson’s. Nor any other inspector you’ve had to work with—”

“Has Innocent been getting onto you?”

“About what?”

“Me. About this inspector’s position.”

“She didn’t say anything about an inspector’s position.” Yes, to the former then. “What position—is she filling Robbie’s job?” And just like that, she looks lost.

“No,” he reassures her quickly. “It’s a new vacancy—she was clear about that.”

“Oh.” She nods, and yet, bewilderingly, her eyes flit back to settle on Franco as if that’s where her instinct is to seek reassurance these days. Even when she grieves for Lewis now. If she grieves for Lewis now. How can that possibly work?

“Poor bloke,” he says, unthinking, as his eyes also alight on Franco.

There's a silence, which causes his gaze to travel back to meet Laura’s properly. Fast.

She's staring at him. Her face stiffens. This, far beyond anything else he's said, has struck home to her.

He should retract that. Fast. Or clarify that, in all honesty, he hadn’t meant it that way. Except he’s reached that dangerous edge of things where he almost craves the momentary sharp relief of saying things he knows full well he’ll regret later. But this is Laura, and he’s not so far gone that he believes in any way what that just sounded like—“I didn’t mean it like that,” he acknowledges.

She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she’s gazing right past him. “James,” she says slowly, “I am going to say this once. Whether or not you are loyalty incarnate makes no difference to whether he comes back.”

The current is tugging hard at his limbs again, and he’s too busy concentrating on breathing to fight it off as it’s pulling him under. He takes in that Laura is looking at him again and her look has softened, but it scarcely seems to matter now. The control is all he’s got.

She puts out a hand towards him. “Look. James. I just think—”

“I’ll leave you to it.”

“James, don’t walk off.”

“Enjoy your evening,” he says courteously.

There’s an awareness pushing against the edges of his mind that he’s going to be sorry for this. That it’s not right to have things coming to a head with Laura in this way, after she’s been kind—it’s a reasonable thought but not one he finds he can attach much belief to.

It’s making the breeze seem colder as he turns to go back to his flat.

===

Spring spreads tactlessly onwards everywhere.

Three weeks go by, and no-one has the courtesy to expire in sufficiently suspicious circumstances now that he needs them to summon Laura up at a crime scene.

And then early on a Wednesday morning, he finds himself sitting waiting in his car outside Lewis’ flat. His car is getting worse. It’s never done its homing pigeon thing in the morning before.

He lets his head sink gently onto the steering wheel and then straightens up hurriedly before any of Lewis’ neighbours happen upon him. The true extent of Lewis’ neighbourliness has emerged by now, and the entire building seems to want an update on his health any time they catch sight of James.

If Lewis was here; if he’d let himself out of that door in his building right now and join James in the car. If he knew about this. If he was here, he’d look at James, his eyes creasing at him in that worried-fond way he has when he considers silently all of James’ battles he can’t identify with, but still worries about when James gets caught up in them all the same. “Well, go on then,” he’d say. “She won’t bite.”

He’s not going to appear.

And, frankly, James is not half so sure about the not-biting bit.

He knows why the car has done this now. He blames the yellow mug. He’d been ambushed by it again this morning when he’d moved a stack of plates. Not in a good way this time. But he turns the car and decides to stop by the John Radcliffe instead. It feels inevitable.

In the hopeless end of a dark January, and the equally hopeless and bitter end of a case, and knowing there was little prospect of making it home that night; he’d rung Laura to ask her to stop by his and let Monty in. It had been too cold to keep him out so late, and he’d thought Monty could do with a bit of reassurance that there was still a kind human in the world. Laura would talk to him for a bit.

He’d woken the next morning, far too early, with the vaguest memory of falling into sleep scant hours before. Monty was on his bed. The case was over, and with it any hope of redemption for anyone involved. There’d been no immediate need to go in, but no hope of further sleep. And the quiet had been so loud it’d impinged on his ears.

When he’d stumbled into the kitchen, he’d found a note stuck to his bag of coffee. FRIDGE, it had said. With a helpful arrow pointing in the direction of the fridge. He’d still been asleep, to the extent that he had obediently picked up the coffee to follow its storage instructions, before he’d caught himself, and he’d pulled the fridge door open, curious. She knew he took his coffee black.

Inside there’d been the makings of a full English. He’d stood gazing, gently chilling his bare chest, until an unlikely flash of yellow on the worktop had jabbed at the corner of his vision.

It had been a mug. An appallingly yellow mug. With a large black outline of an anthropomorphised sun strolling to work. He’d known this was where the sun was going because, in addition to ironically wearing sunglasses, it was carrying a briefcase. GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE, had said the slogan underneath it. Crikey.

He’d looked around and seen the flat through Laura’s eyes, for a moment, before his vision had settled back into owner’s blindness. There had been rather a lot of coffee mugs around the place. Granted, no clean ones. And Laura Hobson was not about to do his dishes for him. But she’d make sure he didn’t have to go anywhere, or face anyone, or even interact with the jarring self-service machine in his local Sainsbury’s that morning.

So if he’d strongly suspected she’d entertained herself choosing the most incongruous mug she could possibly find, that was her prerogative. He’d make it his morning coffee mug from now on.

It wasn’t really her fault. She couldn’t have known it would become the brightest ever beacon of visually disturbing guilt.

There’s a report he needs that he could send a PC to collect. Pushing open the door to the morgue corridor, half of him hopes Laura won’t work that out, and the other half hopes she does. But barring any unexpected arrivals overnight, it’ll be fairly empty here yet. He’s nearly resigned to that lack of anyone here including her when he catches sight of her in the little office, with her back to him, searching the file cabinet.

He stops just inside the doorway, opens his mouth, and finds he has no idea where to start. “Laura,” he tries.

“James,” she says, turning quickly, not hiding her surprise.

Asking for the report seems like the wrong thing to do, after all. She waits for a moment, watching him, and then leans her hip against the desk, file folded in her arms. “What have you been up to? I heard Jean’s put you in the cupboard under the stairs.”

He recovers some of his acuity and shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, despite the over-warm air in the office. “Where do you even hear all this? I prefer to think of it as a sideways move.”

“I note you don’t deny cupboard. Under the stairs. You do know they’re calling you Harry Potter.”

“What?”

“The Chosen One. Although I’m not so sure that’s not a reference to Jean’s efforts to get you to apply for this position.” She grimaces at him thoughtfully. “That seems to be causing some rancor.”

It is? He wonders how on earth Innocent’s attempts to persuade him have even leaked out. “There’s a station newsletter, isn’t there? There’s a station newsletter and someone’s left me off the mailing list.”

“That particular bit of news? That, I think, was Alan.”

“Well, he’s a mere muggle. You can’t expect him to appreciate the nuances of the wizarding world.”

“You’ll get sorted into Slytherin, talking like that.”

“Probably fair enough,” James mutters. She shakes her head at him. And it’s almost, almost, possible just to say—something. Something properly conciliatory. Except Laura’s face always looks ready to tip over into humour when she asks him questions about himself. As if his answers are already secretly amusing her. It had made him suspicious for the first couple of years. But he must have grown accustomed to it, without noticing, because he misses that, now it’s gone from her expression. She looks—it’s hard to put his finger on it, but the best he can do is she looks wary.

“Why is Peterson telling you things? I haven’t even moved yet.”

“He thought I’d know already.” And it isn’t meant to be a reproach, but they can both see that’s the end of any further attempts at sparring.

She puts the file down and turns back to face him. “James. Why has Jean taken you off active duty?”

“She hasn’t,” says James, astonished into dropping the barriers without even noticing their fall. “Why would she?”

“Just—”

“Is that what Peterson said?”

“No. He said they’re all busy working out if being given this project means you have the promotion sewn up. It just sounded to me like that’s what Jean’s done.”

“It isn’t.”

“No. Okay. I just wondered.”

“She wants me to go for this promotion," says James, confused. “So she wouldn’t—No, honestly, that’s not it.”

“I was sure it wouldn’t be a performance issue.”

“It’s a resource allocation thing. This project,” he says, trying to replay that conversation with Innocent in his mind. “She said she needs—Anyway,” he realises aloud in relief, “the project is only half time for now. I’m still at Peterson’s beck and call whenever. And Grainger’s.”

“Alan did say,” she says, still watching him. She still doesn’t look satisfied.

“And that’s partly why I get an office to do things in. It needs a proper lockable door.”

“I can’t believe they’re putting a door on that space—although I suppose you are used to cells.” Her eyes are still looking at him in a way that suggests there’s an entirely different conversation going on between them than the one they’re having.

“I don’t spend much time in them, myself. I just bung other people in.”

“I meant of the monastic kind.”

“It’s a multipurpose mezzanine space,” he tells her. This clearly makes no impression on Laura. And it's not that they need Lewis here for them to reconnect. It’s just that the lack of him, what’s turned into the sore edges around the void he's left—she’s still looking at him more in the way she used to look at him when he first worked with her; before Lewis had ever returned from overseas and drawn them firmly into each other’s orbit. Giving her a Yorkie bar in time-honoured fashion is not about to get him restored in Laura’s eyes. And for the life of him, he still can’t form an apology. Not while Lewis is gone and they don’t know if he’s okay, and yet she’s—not while Lewis is gone.

He knows what he’d said outside the restaurant had sounded pretty bad. But he’s also aware that Laura knows him well enough to know when he doesn’t mean things. And she’s too honest to take offence from the words when the sentiment isn’t really there. So this isn’t exactly because of what he’d said.

Nor even, he doesn’t think, because he’s the one who’d walked off and left her in the street and, in doing so, made things more irretrievable. He hadn’t left her alone, though. She’d had Franco to go back into and the warmth and light of that. So it wouldn’t feel as bad as someone walking off in anger and leaving you in the cold street alone. He hadn't done that to her.

But he just seems, somehow, to have put things beyond either of their abilities to fix for the moment.

“When I first came here,” Laura says, “I’d swear that space was where the cleaners kept their mops.”

He leaves soon after that, with the exact information that he’s given up and asked for when the pauses became too long, and having achieved nothing that he needed to after all.

Maybe he should have brought her a coffee. That’s what Lewis would have done. A coffee and some better words.

He couldn’t have predicted it’d matter so much being at odds with Laura. He’s fairly used at feeling at odds with the world, after all. But she’s someone whose friendship had made that feeling gently ebb away. Laura and Lewis. He hadn’t realised how far the feeling had ebbed until it’d risen up again.  
  
And now Lewis has left him with a cat, half-shares in a depleted bottle of Talisker, a relationship with a pathologist that defies any easy understanding, and a heartache so all-encompassing that it’s gnawing at him from the inside, hollowing him out.

He’s weary. In a way that sleep won’t do much to assail. From setting his shoulder against the world, so it doesn’t turn too far and leave Lewis behind. And the sheer effort of carrying things, in secret, and living in a different reality to others. He’s deep down weary in the part of him that keeps fighting for his reality that Lewis will come back.

He’s begun to wonder sometimes how much easier it might be if Lewis had never appeared in the first place. So that James could still walk away now. But he’d inked in the man’s name on a sign. And this was what had happened.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are references to the immediate aftermath of Dead of Winter in this chapter, in the form of a post-episode coda focused on Lewis and James, as remembered by James. There is nothing graphic referred to and no explicit references but the emotional/psychological aftermath of events is evoked.

He’s having that dream again. Or yet another variation on the theme of it. This time, he’s in a wood, but the tree trunks are missing. So the tree tops bob and dip and rustle anxiously. Levitating. This time, he knows it’s a dream and he’s not fallen into a Surrealist painting. That knowledge doesn’t seem to be helping him wake up. The rustling is getting louder and more insistent as the leaves begin to tumble down now, too rapidly, turning brown and crackingly dry by the time they land around his feet. The sun is glaring appallingly overhead as the canopy grows skeletal. It’s making him squint painfully and his head throb with jarring flashes of light.

He opens his eyes.

The overhead light is in entirely the wrong place. So bright directly above him that his eyes start blinking in protest. He must have fallen asleep on the couch with the lights on. His head really is throbbing, his throat is dry and—he’s not on the couch. He’s lying on a high narrow bed, the curtains are nearly touching his feet and, most bizarrely, he’s looking at the wrong side of them. He blinks harder and tries to focus on the pattern. Starfish in colours nature never intended them to be. Which in James’ unfortunate experience means—

He closes his eyes in defeat and in the hopes this is another dream. But the rustle sounds again. Except now it makes him think of weekend mornings. He turns his head this time before he opens his eyes. And he finds himself in—yes. No getting away from it. A cubicle in John Radcliffe A&E. And Laura is sitting beside the bed, reading a newspaper.

“There’s no need to emulate him _quite_ so thoroughly you know,” she says, without looking up.

“What?”

She raises her eyes only to pierce him with a look. “Robbie. He made quite the habit of this in his sergeant days. Managed to concuss himself twice in the space of as many weeks, as he tells it.”

“He—concuss himself?”

“Yes. Once he got wiped out by a good old-fashioned assailant with a good old-fashioned blunt object, and once he got whacked over the head with a cricket bat. Very sporting.”

“I have concussion?” James asks. It might explain this conversation.

“The jury’s still out on that one.”

“I’m sure it’s just—”

“You’re sure it’s just whatever gets you out of here quickest, at a guess.”

“Well…” But he’s waking up properly now. “Hold on.” He struggles into a more upright position. “I remember. Julie drove me here to get checked out.”

“That's right.”

“Although it was just a minor bump on the head. If that.”  
  
“That’s the theory we’re currently working on.”

“So why was I in some sort of unconscious state?”

She gives him a frustrated glance. “You were asleep. You dropped off while waiting for the doctor. Because of—now, what’s the medical term?” She studies the ceiling and then clicks her fingers and returns her gaze to him. “Oh, yes, that’s it, sheer bloodyminded overexhaustion.”

He looks at her. He’d quite like to inform her that he doesn’t think much of her bedside manner. And have her tell him she hears no complaints from her patients. But although she’s meeting his eyes, just as usual, there’s that certain wariness still clouding her gaze. She still looks mistrustful.

And yet she’s been sitting here beside him while he slept.

“The light was in the wrong place,” he tells her.

She folds the paper, smooths it, and tosses it onto the bedside locker. A broadsheet into columns and neatly flattened. He watches her, half-fascinated. Partly, he’s still not feeling wholly alert—he feels rather as if someone has clouted him over the head with a cricket bat—and partly she’s so dexterous, deft with her hands. “As long as you’re not tempted to go towards it.”

“And you’ve just been sitting here?” he asks, after a moment. Because she very much still is. She’s wearing her own weekday work clothes rather than scrubs, and his suit jacket is hung over the back of the chair she’s sitting on. Well, one of the chairs. She’s robbed another one from somewhere and has her feet up on it. She looks quite settled here. She’s also making those chairs look comfortable, which, frankly, is no mean feat.

“Just sitting? I’ve been catching up on world affairs, enjoying a sandwich and a cappuccino, thanks very much. It was good of you to choose a Friday—Arts Section. I can’t think of the last time I sat and read the actual print version cover to cover on a weekday afternoon.”

He’s barely listening by the time she stops. Coffee sounds like a fantastic idea. He licks his lower lip. She eyes him, and then she reaches for the plastic lidded jug of water and undoubtedly equally plastic glass on the bedside locker. He’s quite glad he doesn’t have to move to get them himself. Lying half-propped on these pillows, it still feels like his body hasn’t caught up with the need to wake up. Never mind the dizziness.

“It’s from being asleep in the afternoon,” he realises aloud. The utter disorientation of being roused artificially at the wrong time of day. He’s woken very prematurely, even if he’d never meant to go to sleep. And the throbbing head is just from the bit of a knock.

“Did you think you were waking with a hangover?” Laura asks, handing over the cup. But her eyes are giveaway sharp.

Oh, Christ. Better not to go down that conversational path. He focuses undue attention on drinking his water. “What were you saying—about him and a cricket bat?”

“Oh, yes. He always claims that he had no after-effects because he has an especially thick skull. High-quality bone density.” She pronounces it in disdain. “Or a head like an anvil, as he then resorted to saying, after I disabused him of that little notion.”

“That makes no sense,” James says, perking up. “Anyone with a knowledge of acceleration–deceleration…”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Laura in satisfaction. “But try convincing him of that. He persists in thinking he’s a reliable witness, even when he’s just been knocked out. No recognition that bashed-in skulls are practically my stock-in-trade.”

“Are you meant to be in work now?”

She ignores that. “Someone had to keep the registrar at bay. They’re very keen to run tests on you. Falling asleep after a suspected head injury? I had to explain that your normal dissolute habits are quite the confounding variable. By the look of you, you’d have fallen asleep out in the waiting room given half a chance. I got here just in time to stop them waking you to check you weren’t in a coma.”

“How d’you know I wasn’t?” he asks, curious.

“Your obs are fine. And you obligingly mumbled the odd thing. Interesting dreams you have there, Hathaway. I’ll let them know you’ve decided to wake up.”

She leaves him, wide-eyed, on this note, doing a hurried mental audit of anything that could have escaped from the woods and forests of his dreams. Laura’s so bloody astute it’s not even safe to have dreams in her general vicinity. But she’s also coming back. Even though he must have upended her day; it’s well past her lunchbreak now.

“I don’t think he’s hurrying back from the sounds of things,” she tells James when she returns. “The reg. I may have put his nose out of joint. Minor tussle of professional egos. Don’t worry, us doctors are renowned for being humble, self-effacing types, I’m sure he’ll be over it by the time he deigns to return.”

James considers how bad this must be for Laura to remark upon it. Quite bad then. “Well, there’s no need for me to wait. You could assess me. I’m sure you’re capable.”

“Why thank you so much.”

“You know what I mean. I’m perfectly well orientated. Test me.”

“Why do men take this part as an actual challenge?” she mutters to herself. “You want me to ask your name, rank, and serial number and who the current prime minister is?”

“Not unless I slept through the revolution. It’ll be too depressing.”

“Okay. Put it another way. Do you recall what you were doing directly before you sustained the injury?”

This gives him pause. “I was injured in the line of duty,” he says distantly. “It’s related to a sensitive case.”

“Yes. You’ll have to do better than that. You could be compensating for lack of precise recall with a vague reply.”

“Or the information could be confidential.”

“Oh, I’m not sure how confidential you can call it when a whole copse full of coppers saw you trip and fall. But I can see why you might want to keep it so. When you were paying more attention to your phone screen than where you were going.”

“You knew already,” he says, chagrined.

“Never mind,” she says, consoling. “Not like anyone took a video for YouTube. They’ll just remember. It’s a shame the scar on your forehead won’t be lightning-shaped, though. They’d have loved that. Grow your hair a bit and it’ll effectively disappear—leave it alone, James, it shouldn’t need stitches unless you poke it open. Is this your way of persuading Jean that she’d be better off leaving you indoors than making you join in damp searches of random thickets?”

It hadn’t been that random—it had been Wytham again. The other end this time. “Peterson had a tip-off it was used for a major drugs transfer last night. We were looking for trace evidence.” Being an extended SOCO for the day, James had mentally dubbed it. This was precisely the kind of _borrow-your-sergeant_ request Lewis used to save him from. “Who told you about it anyway? How d’you even know I was here?”

“Julie. She didn’t want to leave you here by yourself for some reason.”

“I know. But I sent her back to the station.”

“Julie strikes me as a woman who knows how to interpret an order within the wider context it’s been given. Acts under her own initiative when she feels the situation calls for it. Don’t you think so? Because I think you should put that under ‘readiness for advancement’ in her next review.” She relents. “She seems to have hung around for a bit. Then she popped down to see me once she saw you were taking your afternoon nap.”

James struggles with the remnants of his dignity. Julie had been sympathetic on the drive over but surprisingly resistant. “Sorry, Sarge, Inspector Peterson’s orders.” He’d never encountered this from her before. But then he’d hardly been in the habit of trying to get her to circumnavigate Lewis’ orders, had he? She’d been polite, respectful and utterly bloody impervious to persuasion. Then apparently she’d disregarded her marching orders, made her way to the morgue and—“What did she say to you?”

“Very little. She hovered in her straight-backed professional way, hands behind her back, until I wanted to say ‘ _At ease, soldier_.’ Asked me some perfectly obvious questions about the last autopsy report she’d collected from me. Inquired politely after my colleague’s corpse du jour. Then she happened to mention where you were and what you’d been up to. I said ‘noted.’ She looked mightily relieved and left.”

Julie who, more than anyone, still asks after Lewis. Which produces the same sort of mingled pain and relief for James as picking at a badly-healing scar. Not that Julie probes. But she’s fond of Lewis, so it doesn’t seem right to have her think—he generally prevaricates and says Lewis is doing okay, and hopes to God that’s true.

Laura is considering him, eyes narrowed. “She does seem to have inadvertently created a bit of a stir by hovering round here beforehand.”

“How?”

“Well, while you’ve been dead to the world, the occupants of the two beds opposite have been having a fine time bonding in gory speculation about the dangerous felon under police guard. Suspected Clavicle Fracture admires your suit so much he’ll accept nothing less than investment banking fraud. He thinks someone took a swing at you. Broken Ankle, on the other hand, thinks you have the look of a silent killer.”

Oh, God. Poor Julie. He can just picture her standing hesitant hidden guard and valiantly ignoring that. He feels sick and tired of himself these days.

“ _Noted_ ,” he tells Laura. That seems to satisfy her. She pushes her feet more comfortably against the lip of the chair.

He tries to get a surreptitious look at his watch under his shirt cuff. “Are you using my fragile state of health to get out of your lunchtime journal group? It’s the first Friday of the month, isn’t it?”

He enjoys the look she sends him. “Journal Club was postponed until next week. Okay?”

It isn’t really. He’s now wondering if she’d be here otherwise.

“James.” He looks at her. “Stop trying to get me to leave unless you actually want me to leave.”

That silences him. He grimaces at her mutely. She looks right back and twists her mouth at him. “Look. What would you do? If I was remiss enough to fall over and—”

“You wouldn’t be.”

“No, I wouldn’t," she agrees. “But let’s stretch our imaginations here and picture it for a moment. And then imagine I was stubborn enough to provoke my boss so he pulled out full protocol and shipped me off to get checked out here because I wouldn’t just agree to go to my own doctor…”

“He’s not my—he’s the supervising officer at the scene.” So either Julie had let that slip, or Laura’s worked it out. She does, James consoles himself, know Peterson and so therefore must be acquainted with his highly inconvenient officious streak. “You wouldn’t have to come to A&E. You work with a bunch of doctors who can see when someone just has a small head wound.”

“Let’s say I fancied an afternoon siesta, so I agreed. What would you do?”

She doesn’t sound like she’s teasing. She sounds intent, like a lot depends on his answer. Like it’s the critical question in an interview.

He bites down, hard, on the retort that he wouldn’t want to run into Franco again, and lets himself genuinely picture it instead. “I’d smuggle you in a decent coffee.”

She doesn’t take the hint, sadly. But her eyes warm at him. And then she’s shaking her head at him in that so-familiar way. “You see?” she says. “Okay then?”

“Okay.” He’s not completely sure what he’s agreeing to—maybe he’ll have to concede a knock to the head after all. But it seems to mean something. He’s somehow been forgiven, just for being willing to acknowledge aloud what, of course, he’d do for her, although she should have no need to hear that…

And then, as he watches the remnants of that wary look finally clear away, he remembers how, last time Franco had appeared, Laura had taken him by surprise, by minding James’ own assumed betrayal of her; telling Lewis. ‘I see,’ she’d said, looking between them with that mixture of anger and hurt. ‘Well I’ll leave you _boys_ to it.’

The way she’d looked at him had driven him, later, and entirely against his better judgement, to get involved even further than the two of them had already dragged him into it, and talk to her and mention, incidentally, that he hadn’t. Told Lewis.

This time he’d wholeheartedly taken an absent Lewis’ side. But what did she expect him to do—maybe she expected him to allow she had a side. Show that he cared about what was happening with her and what would make her decide to pursue things with someone else.

She had seemed to want, on that cold street, to explain it to him, however angrily. He hadn’t left much room for that.

And Laura expects things. People she has relationships with to be a certain way with her. He still remembers her genuine amazement, on her friend’s murder case, when she’d taken in that Lewis, with James standing discomfited backup, was genuinely questioning her. Questioning her integrity. He remembers that shift in her expression as she’d finally had to absorb the blow they were dealing. He still remembers the sound of her “Robbie.” It had been painful.

He’d thought afterwards that he’d like to be so genuinely bewildered if someone he loved had seemed to doubt him. To be so very sure of them. She’d expected them to know her and trust her and be implicitly on her side.

Maybe because, at this moment in time, he can’t think of a time when she wasn’t on either of theirs.

And she’d forgiven them and gone back to trusting them. Choosing to be so trusting in friendships must open you up to a world of hurts. Laura has seemed so clear-sighted and pragmatic, amid all of the confused pain of the last few months, that he hadn’t paid enough attention to his ability to hurt her by not valuing their own friendship, amid his loyalty to Lewis.

And yet she’d come now. Knowing there wasn’t much wrong with him, and while they were still what Lewis would call ‘on the outs’ with each other, but she’d come all the same. And stayed for him to wake up to her here. Just because he’s worn out, and his tiredness has gotten him into bother.

Some of his feelings must be showing in his expression because her lips move into a smile at him. Her eyes too. It’s the first genuine smile he’s seen from her since—well, since he very much interrupted her smiling across a dinner table at Franco.

“Right, my coffee’s long since cold. Let’s see if I can spring you from this joint.”

He waits for her to come back, and he doesn’t bother moving yet. Partly, it’s still preferable not to disturb his head, and partly he’s got enough to keep him busy thinking.

“Pending a final set of obs,” she announces, pushing aside the curtains, “it looks like they’ll release you into the care of a responsible adult for the next few hours. That would be someone who’s capable of reading a text message and walking, simultaneously,” she adds, as an aside.

James bridles a little at this but doesn’t have long to do so when he takes in what she means. “It’s okay. I don’t expect—”

“Then expect, James. Expect that what you’d do for me; I’d do for you.”

If it wasn’t for the uncomfortably enlightening thoughts of the last few minutes, he might still politely fight her off. “It’s not really how I operate,” he says, half to himself.

“Try upgrading your operating system then,” she says briskly, “You’re long overdue. You’ve got firewalls against…obsolete viruses,” she finishes vaguely.

He grins at this descent of a promising metaphor into one that would make Gurdip wince. “Did I pass your orientation test then?” Although it occurs to him, as he speaks, that he’d unwittingly passed a much more important one instead. “Because I feel fine.” Or at least he’s had actual hangovers which were worse than this, so relatively speaking...

“Fine?”

He starts to nod and then ceases the movement abruptly. But that seems to escape her notice for once. She’s got bigger fish to fry. She puts her hand on the side of the bed. Glory. James levers himself up a bit, using his elbows, in surprise at the way she’s glaring at him.

“It’s a weekday afternoon, and you’re lying on a trolley in A&E because you’re essentially so tired that you tripped over your own two feet. Although you thought you were waking with a hangover. You’ve slept through lunch, and yet all you’re interested in is my coffee cup.”

“I could eat a sandwich,” he volunteers hurriedly.

This does not appease her. It has the opposite effect.

“You see? I’m not saying your self-care skills are worthy of the name when Robbie is around, but at least he orders you home occasionally. And his reluctance to miss a meal means you eat regularly because half the time it only occurs to you that you’re hungry when there’s food in front of you. And it’s pints down the pub with him, or him putting you on orange juice if only because he still gets a kick out of the fact that he can do that to a sergeant. Either way, it’s a lot less weekly units than whatever it is you’re drinking at home. And now that buffer between you and self-neglect has gone, and you’re— _fine_ is the word you’d use?”

He’s too startled to deny any of this. Because she’s been storing this up. She’s been worried, however unneccesarily, and she’s been storing this up.

“Why doesn’t Jean just evict you from the station in the evenings?” She sounds ready to demand the same thing of Innocent.

“She tries. I outwit her. It’s an ongoing skirmish we’ve got going on.” He’s never felt such a feeling of warmth from someone having a go at him before. Like all that care had been there just waiting for him to trip and fall into it.

Even though it hadn’t been the tiredness that had made him fall. Not in the way she thinks. It had been an odd moment. He’d read a text, replying to one of his enquiries on one of his cold case files, with exactly the confirmation he’d been looking for, and he’d reached for Lewis’ arm to halt him as well. Pure habit while engrossed in the text and that feeling of a hunch coming to fruition. It didn’t mean he didn’t know or accept Lewis was gone. Obviously. Just that a part of him, at moments when his mind was tired or distracted, still failed to compute. It was that aborted reach that had caused his fall; his feet stuttering momentarily as he’d found nothing where the most solid and reliable part of his landscape used to be.

He isn’t altogether surprised that it had happened. Lewis has gone missing in action, and the world has tilted off-balance. James could only tilt so far with it before he fell.

And if he’d lain there for a moment longer than he should have, well, that was because, just for that moment, he couldn’t remember why he should get back up. ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep.’ When he listens to the old town hall recordings of Frost reading it, Frost pauses after the _lovely_ ; before he tips down into the _dark and deep_. Just in case anyone thought it was a good thing that the woods were beguiling in their darkness. It had been that sort of a pause. That was all.

The tree root that had done for his head, on the other hand, in such humiliating fashion, should very plainly have been underground where it belonged, minding its own business.

Laura is waiting, not noticeably patiently, for his attention. “You can have a sandwich,” she tells him. “What you can’t have is caffeine after a possible head injury. We haven’t decided yet if its a vital lifesaver in field medicine for TBIs, or if it makes your concussion worse.”

“I’d be willing to help you out there.”

“Anyone who’s so addicted to coffee that he’ll accept one with arsenic in it doesn’t get to give informed consent to be a guinea pig. Do you actually want a sandwich?”

He sighs. She really has the advantage over him in thought processes today. It doesn’t seem worth the effort of pretending interest in a coffee cart sandwich. He’s saved from coming up with an acceptable response by the arrival of the registrar.

Laura picks up the newspaper and pretends absorption, but her eyes flicker sideways in amusement as James tries to control his own instinct to be testy in the face of testily-delivered questions. Even when they’ve finished with the medical formalities for discharge; there’s the paperwork. The need to confirm every solitary detail they have on file for him, even his religion. Perhaps he should detail the many and various changes made to his theological convictions since he first filled out that form here, trying to get discharged from the morning after the night of Zoe Kenneth. He’d struggled to tick any box then.

Except his personal details form is now contained in a medical file which means he can’t possibly take possession of it this time. And the discharging medic is a registrar who feels that being obliged to do this is very much below the status he’s fighting to maintain, which is sincerely not helping matters.

“And the current number for your emergency contact is still...?”

The radiator behind the bed clanks, and the cubicle is over-hot and noisy.

Left alone, James would simply say ‘yes,’ confirm the emptily useless number and leave it at that. It’s not like they’re going to check. But Laura has tuned sharply back in at that.

“I don’t really need—” he tries.

“ _I_ need to update the records with the current number. Unless you’d like to furnish me with a different contact.” He can’t know it’s not that easy for James, he can’t possibly know, and yet the trap of the question comes at him like a low blow.

“That’s okay,” Laura says, holding out a hand. “I’ll fill it in.”

“I should, really…” the registrar says, looking down at Laura.

Laura smiles back up at him. What James mentally dubs her _don’t push it_ professional smile. No contest. “I’ll make sure the number is up to date,” she says, as she relieves him of the file. “Thanks.”

“That’ll be a good trick if you can manage it,” mutters James. Laura is watching the registrar move out of earshot. Then she turns back to look at him. James deflates. “Lewis—he said I should put him,” he finds himself saying. “It’s like a work thing.”

“It’s okay, James.” It does seem to be. She looks as disheartened as he feels, but this time they’re back to a common cause. “Well,” she says, pulling the curtain back around them. “That’s cast a bit of a dampener on proceedings. And we were having such a lovely time. Where do you keep your pen in this cat-haired jacket then?”

“Inner pocket. What are you going to put?”

“My number. You do have family somewhere, I take it?”

“Somewhere,” James agrees. Truly amazing how much one word can cover, sometimes.

“Then you’ll give me a number, and I’ll keep it somewhere separate. I’ll only use it if you’re threatening to be in need of my professional services. Agreed?”

James, unable to reply to this, nods at her. This was pretty much what Lewis had indicated, once upon a time. After his own fashion.

He’d driven James here early on a Winter’s morning. Despite the paramedics having cobbled James’ physical self back together with that servicable sling. Despite Laura having requested a look, amid her eagle-eyed supervision of the exhumation of what would turn out to be the body of Briony Grahame’s mother, and then providing her own reassurance at the scene. But James, in the circumstances, had felt unable to object.

“You’re to get that arm looked at properly,” Lewis had said, halfway back to Oxford and still driving in Crevecoeur’s shadow. And if it wasn’t apparent if that was a directive from Innocent, someone’s medical advice, or Lewis’ own decision; it was abundantly clear that that was exactly what was going to happen.

Silence had seemed the only remaining option. Even when Lewis had locked the car, and followed James in, when James had thought he’d just been dropped off. Because James was following orders again. Part of him had been expecting a hand on his collar, metaphorically speaking, if he’d tried to diverge from the path to A&E. But part of him was still expecting, as part of him had never ceased to expect, a thought-paralysing presence behind him, an altogether different hand descending on his collar. And for the last few days it had been there, pulling him back into the past, holding him there, letting him know that there never would be a real escape.

The grief of having it erode his life from the inside out again, and threaten the things he’d built and fought his confused way towards for years, the certainties he’d had a few short weeks ago; before Zelinski, before going back to the Hall, events which now seemed to be all of one helplessly inevitable piece—it had overwhelmed the intervening years as if they had never happened. And James had found himself, amid the ruins and disbelief of this case, beside the lake, aiming to wound Lewis in as unforgivable a way as Paul would try to, bare hours later.

Deflecting a bullet had seemed the least James could do after that.

And yet here he was. Being forgiven. Again. It was Lewis’ angry protective presence at James’ back instead. Even though some of that anger must surely be directed straight at James.

When they’d reached A&E, Lewis had waited for his attention. Then he’d motioned with his head to the row of plastic seats in the quietest bit, and he’d headed off to the far side where he’d flashed his badge to get past the first blockade and speak to the triage nurse. Something about the length of time it had been since James was wounded.

It was only when James had had to confirm that, yes, this had happened the previous evening, that he’d begun to wonder why Lewis had let him evade capture by the paramedics and stay at the scene all night. Until he’d realised that Lewis hadn’t been letting him go off before Lewis had simmered down enough to have a word on a frost-covered lawn at first light. Enough of a word to bring James back. _If it’s all the same to you_ … He hadn’t been letting James out of his sight until he’d said his piece. And yet he’d said his piece, and here he was still was, somewhere nearby, James knew, as James submitted to the whole process of wound checking and re-dressing and all the waiting inbetween.

Until, almost home free, a nurse had noticed what no-one else had noticed when James had first filled out that personal details form. That the number James had written in as an emergency contact was identical to James’s own. When you filled out a form yourself, no-one tended to notice that. Hiding in plain sight. The mere thought that his father or Nell could have been called by someone in the Radcliffe in the aftermath of the Phoenix case, while he was still in that drugged sleep, had been enough to appall James into becoming resourceful. Very resourceful.

And this time, again, there’d been no way he could contemplate it. It was Crevecoeur—he couldn’t have said their names for the world. This had rapidly deteriorated into a doggedly pointless argument with the nurse about the lack of any need for her to have this information— " _I’m a serving police officer_ ”—or her legal right to require it.

James had been stiffly and furiously disengaging when Lewis had poked his head in between the curtains .

“Give me that, and I’ll put his details in. I’m his boss.”

James had lain silent. He’d been unsure how things were swinging now and unable to take much more of any of this either way. Since Zelinski he’d felt sometimes like barely-resistant thistledown. As if it hardly mattered what he did. And the air currents had been merciless.

Seeing the nurse hesitate, Lewis had turned on his full confiding charm. “Not like he can write too well at the moment. Anyone would’ve trouble reading his scrawl at the best of times. I’m going to have to make him type every post-it he leaves me for the foreseeable, till he’s out of that thing. And you’ll have some idea. We could nearly give you a run for your money in the paperwork department.” Lewis’ eyes had crinkled at her. “I’m a copper, lass. We have these forms too, you know.”

When she’d left the file on the bedside locker, James had angled it towards himself with an almost-redundant elbow. Lewis had tugged it out from under him without further ceremony and settled himself in the chair, pulling out a pen.

“I’ll be your first port of call. Liaison if you like. Saves anyone getting a call when it’s just people fussing.” Neither Innocent nor the NHS staff seemed remotely inclined to fuss, but James had recognised the offer for what it was. “Unless you manage to get us both shot next time, of course,” Lewis had said thoughtfully, tapping his pen on the form. “Yelling out like that. That could be a tricky one. Tell you what, you put a number in your phone for dire emergency, and we’ll put me as your emergency contact here. Deal with anything else if we come to it. Not to worry about it otherwise.”

And he’d casually, carefully, not looked at James at all until he’d taken care of matters; throwing his second lifeline of the morning with unerring aim.

“Can we go now, Sergeant? I can’t remember the last time I saw my bed. And folk are going to think you’ve been gallivanting at some nobbish college event.” James had blinked at him, and realised that he was still in evening dress. “You look like the living embodiment of the morning after the nightmare before.” That had pretty much summed it up too.

They’d been stymied in their joint escape attempt by a doctor bearing a prescription for pain relief, which, she’d assured James, wouldn’t interfere with his ability to stay alert. She’d probably thought they were about to launch into a day of further detecting. It had reminded James of what still had to be done on this case. The mere thought of it had made him want to crawl into a dark burrow and pull the drawbridge up. He’d gazed at the prescription and nodded automatically. Being perpendicular again wasn’t agreeing with him. Then he’d become aware that Lewis was running his eyes over him and not much liking what he saw. He’d made an belated attempt at straightening up.

“Can’t you give him ones that do?” Lewis had said to the doctor. “Make him drowsy? He’s been running behind with his sleep these last few weeks. Doesn’t need that with the pain of his arm now.”

“I don’t—” James had opened his mouth to instinctively refute any and all of this.

“Better than resorting to the bottle,” Lewis had murmured, his eyes appraising. James had shut up.

If they’d had the Talisker back then, though, he’d like to think he’d almost have been taken back for a glass of it. Except, after Crevecoeur, he wouldn’t have sat and had a drink with anyone. He couldn’t have. It had taken an interminable time to get back on any sort of even keel.

But Lewis, sticking his head through those cubicle curtains, had easily stepped over the first of the barriers James had been trying to throw up around his raw and exposed self. He’d known when to let well enough alone and had kept James close somehow, gruff, and just as irritable as ever, and reliable as nothing else, until the world had slowly righted itself and even, unimaginably, turned a little forward. And James had begun to breathe again. And had gradually started to take in that he was now freer than he had been before Doctor Stephen Black was found murdered, on a bus. Freer than he had been since he had started to take piano lessons as a child. That the shadow behind him had reared up and been caught itself. And James had somehow survived it and wasn’t waiting and fearing it happening anymore.

There’s a shrill beep somewhere nearby that startles him, and he comes back to himself in a different A&E cubicle, in the present, with a hand over the scar on his arm. Without a gunshot wound, but with a head it seems important to deny is still aching if anyone asks. Without Lewis, but with Laura, who’s sitting here grimacing at him. She’s sympathetically annoyed on his behalf and not even questioning his absorption.

“Bloody inconsiderate of him,” she says. “Can’t even get away from the lack of him, can we?”

“He is very present in his absence, isn’t he?”

“More than you are most of the time.”

“What?”  
  
“Have you had enough of a nap now? Ready to go home?”

“Don’t you have anything you need to do first?”

“No. Distinct lack of it actually. Bodies are very light on the ground recently, aren’t they?” she confides, sadly. James can’t help the sides of his mouth turning up in amusement. He’s missed her darker humour; it chimes a chord with the murkier places in his soul. She’s also not wrong. Lewis would be chomping at the bit if he were here.

“At least he isn’t missing much.”

“Oh, I think,” she says, “he’d have wanted to be here for this. To give you his own unique perspective on today’s events. You might be glad he wasn’t, though; small mercies. Incidentally, I’m adding him back into your file the moment he returns. I have far too active a social life to do this permanently. What with the frequency of your mishaps.”

“Am I disrupting your plans for this evening? Because you don’t have to…”

“No, James,” she says, patiently. “I don’t have to.” She stands and looks at him, level with his head. “You’d find this a whole lot easier if our positions really were reversed.”

He grimaces in agreement and decides it’s time to get up.

“I suppose,” he tells her, feeling under the bed for his shoes with one foot, “you don’t have your rehearsal until eight this evening, anyway, do you?”

“Okay. You need to stop that now.”

=

“Working from home?” Laura enquires dryly. She’s joined him on his couch. But from the looks she’s sending round his flat, she might as well be snapping on gloves and starting a systematic search.

“Technically, no.”

“Off the clock, would it be?”

James casts a despairing look around. He blames the ghosts. Who seem to have distributed the files far more freely round his flat than he’d remembered. The unsettled ghosts from Innocent’s cold cases. It’s not the official victims; it’s the people they’ve left behind who have begun to haunt him. Waiting, with their lives suspended, unable to move in a forward direction. It feels like a shapeless and terrifying sort of pain they must be still enduring; the not-knowing. And he seems to have lost his defences against other people’s pain.

He’s never been good at letting anything alone when the stakes are so high, and with just a bit more effort on his part…And the thing is, the ghosts are here anyway. Whether or not the files are here doesn’t matter. Work has flooded out around the boundaries it used to be kept firmly within by Lewis. If James showed up too early at Lewis’ flat, mid-case, he was waved in the direction of the kitchen and he found he might as well have breakfast while he waited. And at a certain point in the evening, a pint was going to put a full stop to things. Now his days have lost such comforting bookends.

It makes him put off going to bed. Those moments before sleep when his mind slips free of his control, and is left to its own devices, are the worst ones. So if falling asleep on the couch is not altogether intentional, well, he can’t deny it’s just easier sometimes. If he drops off, face down on the cushions, Monty makes the best of things and settles himself in the dip of James’ back. And it’s not going to matter to James where Monty chooses to sleep when he’s asleep himself, is it? If he comes awake out here in the early hours, mind racing; he wakes in lamplight to a warm and heavy weight, pressing him down, which grounds things.

“James, _is_ it that you won’t sleep?” Laura asks. She’s frowning, in an interested way, at the fourth volume of his _Oxford History of Literary Translation_ , open on the floor, and the architectural piles of books it had inspired him to pull from his shelves for cross-reference. There are clues to his attempts at nightime distraction scattered all around the island of this couch. “Or can’t,” she adds, turning the frown in his direction. “Or are you finding it—” and she’s watching his face with her full attention now, “a bit hard to tell the difference at times.”

“The weariness the fever and the fret,” he offers her, in relief.

“Yes,” she says, dubious. “Well, you’ll need to try harder not to ‘fade far away, dissolve and quite forget’. Come on, I can’t imagine what it took to find an L-shaped couch long enough for you to lie full lenght on. You may as well get your money’s worth. Lie down, and stop trying to be so polite.”

He makes no attempt to argue. He feels distinctly off-balance just from the walk in from her car. She’s already lifting cushions and pushing them into a makeshift structure in the crook of the corner of the couch. Then she taps the top of her construction.

He tries to anticipate the wince and to stiffen the pain from his face as he adjusts the position of his neck. She seems more focused on watching as he digs into his trouser pockets to empty them of uncomfortable things, which he transfers to the coffee table.

She’s unimpressed when the Poet of the Month is revealed. “I knew it. You don’t need Keats. Keats is not going to get you through this. Patient, sleepless Eremite though no doubt you are.”

He grins up at her in delight from this new vantage position. “But he was pretty much in love with his sleep, Keats. Practically wrote paens to it.”

“He’d been a medical student. He knew what he was missing. And I’m not necessarily saying he made the wrong career choice. But anyone poetically urging you to put engaging with the strife of human hearts above a decent night’s rest—there’s enough strife in your life already, James. You know Jean wasn’t asking you to get so immersed.” Her eyes are searching the room again, unhappily. “I should cleanse this flat of the romantic consumptives.”

But she kicks off her shoes and scoots herself back instead. He’s amused to realise that she could probably lie full length on the shorter leg of his couch. She tucks her legs up instead and shifts to get comfortable, leaning her hip against his cushion pile. “How’s the head?” she asks, looking down at him.

He shrugs. With minimal movement.

“You won’t need anyone to do this, then.” And she starts to flex her fingers against his scalp. After the first, astonished, instant, something drawn tight within him abruptly yields. The unfurling of the tension in his neck, as his shoulders sink deeper into the cushions, is close to painful. And her touch is casual in a way he can’t quite comprehend. Despite all those easy arm takings he’s watched over the years, he finds he can’t picture her doing this with Lewis. And the thought of Lewis’ expression, if he was to see this, makes James wonder if this could be construed, in some lights, as a betrayal in itself.

Laura’s gazing out his window, thoughtfully, when he tilts his gaze back to catch her eye, unsure.

“I do miss having cats sometimes,” she says, looking back down at him.

Laughing makes his head feel worse, but that was worth it to have his thoughts so effectively defused.

Her fingers brush and stroke. She’s careful not to go near the sore-bruised area from today’s fall. After a bit, he begins to trust that. And when her cool palms pass near his forehead, it helps. There’s his brain, suspended, and somewhere deep in there the locus of the pain, and then an outer cradling of bone and skull and a layer of short hair which is keeping Laura’s hands from exerting any pressure. Except when she occasionally smoothes his temple, or his cheek, with the side of her hand. He can almost picture her smoothing out the frayed edges of the ugliest tangles of thoughts in his mind.

Monty had better not arrive home early to compete with him for this.

She doesn't say anything for a while. Her hands keep up a firm rhythm. James feels his limbs start to relax, in the late afternoon quiet of his flat. It’s landed up being a really odd day, and he feels like he’s being slowly drawn into sleep as the best retreat.

Until Laura’s phone starts up.

“Excuse me,” she murmurs, and she extricates herself, exiting towards his hallway before he can offer to move.

There’s the cadence of one side of a conversation, quite lively from her end.

After a bit, he hears her laugh.

James sighs and tries to get comfortable again. She hadn’t looked at her screen before she answered, which means it’s someone who calls at the same time each evening. So that’s considerate of Franco. Raising the subject of himself. The man is unerringly consistent in his bad timing, James will grant him that. Things seems doomed to get awkward every time he makes an appearance. Although that wouldn’t, James thinks—unwisely raising his head with the thought and grimacing freely now he’s alone again—that wouldn’t be terribly fair on Laura.

She says nothing when she comes back in. James is still thinking, and she’s distracted. The animation he’d heard in her voice seems to have deserted her.

With Lewis, this would be over by now. That sideways discussion in A&E would have more than covered it. They’d be silently sealing the deal with a pint. With Laura—she’s reclaimed her place on his couch without any fuss, and she’s reclaimed his head while she’s at it, but the movements of her hands are more abrupt. The quality of the silence between them has shifted and torn. It feels more like the silence of the last few weeks. James can’t really take that. He takes a breath, surprised to find he’s the one driven to explain.

“I just thought,” he says, into the quiet, “that after Franco was here that first time and—everything that happened then—that you’d sorted some sort of unspoken not-dating-other-people agreement with Lewis.”

“Did you, James? You thought Robbie and I had an understanding not to date other people _or_ each other?”

Oh, Lord. When she puts it like that…But that’s honestly what it had seemed like. Just not in those words. He must have become inured to how bloody odd their relationship is, over the years of it happening. Or rather not happening but still always (always) there. But Lewis’ fault, or not, his leaving has shifted something for Laura, and James can see it’s become irrevocable now.

Laura can see when she’s hit her mark. “It couldn’t go on like that, James. When I thought about the kind of limbo I was in with Robbie gone—well, it wasn’t much different than the kind of limbo I’m in when he’s here. It just turns out to be a whole lot easier to let go of the idea of me and him when he doesn’t keep turning up. Smiling at me. Whether or not things work out with Franco, this time round, I can’t go back to how things were with Robbie and I. Not after getting some distance from it at last.”

James can see Lewis’ warm all-encompassing smile even as she says it. As clearly as if there isn’t a fog around everything these days. He can quite see her problem. He’d just never realised it was a problem. For her.

Lewis is incredibly fond of Laura. He’d do anything for her. Except, it seems, let her quite as close enough as she needs. And James can’t have made the longstanding battle with the hurt of that feel any better. It had just felt, at the time, like such a frightening betrayal. And yet, whatever complicated thing is apparently going on with her and Franco, Laura is also still grieving for a missing friend. She’s still, as she always has been, someone else who loves Lewis.

“It was a bad evening,” he confesses, at last, in apology. “When I ran into you at the restaurant.”

“I did wonder, afterwards. If that was a bit too close to the time you were getting kicked out of Robbie’s office.”

“Why did you think that?”

“You didn’t seem—quite yourself. Anyway, since when do you clock off in time for an early bird special? Rumour has it you turn into a pumpkin if you leave the nick before the nightshift comes in. You weren’t meant to find out like that, James. How Franco hadn’t rated a mention when we were drinking to Robbie’s health. That wasn’t fair, I know. Don’t do Franco a disservice, though. He matters. We may have things we’re still figuring out, but he matters.”

She’s good enough not to refer to why she’s saying that. Or make the very obvious point that his response to finding out had been even less fair.

The movements of her hands have lengthened and slowed down again, more adagio once more, so he’d hazard a guess that she feels better too. Franco really brings or disperses stormclouds, he’s some sort of weather system all on his own. Then again, James considers, sleepy with relief, he’d want to be if he’s serious about being with Laura, force of nature that she is.

“They’ve abolished Limbo, you know,” he tells her, to console her further. “The Church. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Too bloody right,” Laura says feelingly. “I don’t do well with it.” She seems to be lightly trying to tease the lines from his forehead. It feels so nice he can only imagine it must be working. “What’s happened to everyone who’d already been consigned there then?”

“Theologically speaking? They got out of there and rekindled things with their German ex-boyfriends— _oww_ —as far as I can ascertain. It was a sub clause in the Commission’s report.” She’s pulled on his earlobe in retaliation.

“He’ll come back, James,” she says, once he’s settled down again. “Okay? Franco makes no difference to that, even if Robbie knew. It doesn’t mean I think he’s not coming back, or that I don’t still worry about him too. We haven’t lost him; we’ve misplaced him temporarily. They’ve put him somewhere for safekeeping, and they just won’t tell us where.”

He grimaces his recognition of this. He’s fighting off sleep again already. All his reactions are slowing right down.

“It is odd,” he says, mulling it over, pleasantly muddled-drowsily, “how when he goes the murders stop. Because I’d only just picked him up from Heathrow last time, and I got my first murder case as a DS.”

“He arranges things so he misses all the boring bits. Think of the six months of staff meetings he’s avoided now.”

“I know. He doesn’t even send his apologies. And he was meant to cover Easter for me, and he’s gotten out of that this year.”

“You had that arranged with him back in November?”

“It’s a yearly thing. He takes Easter because I take Hallowe’en. Easter is open season in the Church—the band always had a lot on.”

“What do you mean you ‘take’ Hallowe’en?”

James’ eyes open to find her looking directly at him. “Just—”

She waits him out, in silence. _Bugger_ , he hears the Lewis in his head saying.

“He just wants to be available. You know, around. In case you'd like him to be.”

Her eyes are flickering like she’s replaying something. “He does always ask me for a drink. As regular as clockwork. I know full well what he’s doing, James. I did not know it was a conspiracy.”

“It really isn’t. I just thought, the first year—afterwards. That Lewis might want to be sure he was free. It’s what we call cover but it’s more like I can stave things off for a bit; we can do that if we need to.” Generally by misinforming Innocent, in the event of a callout, that the other one is stuck out of town and currently en route back. “And then he offered Easter—it’s not like we talk about it.”

“Of course not,” says Laura. Although in a different tone than she usually says it. “So this was your scheme?”

James, having thoroughly messed up, sees he’d better take a bullet for the team. “Not for him to do it. Just for how to make sure he was free…he was pretty relieved, I could see.”

“God,” she mutters to herself, “I can see why Robbie gets so—”

“Annoyed. Irritable. Short-tempered. Disgruntled. Tetchy,” James supplies. All tendencies Lewis may well decide to demonstrate when he learns that this plotting has been revealed to the one person who was never meant to know about it. And she hadn’t even got the thumbscrews out.

“None of the above,” she says, shortly. She doesn't clarify though.

She must miss all that about Lewis too. “If he isn’t back this Hallowe’en, I’d be happy to—I mean, obviously, if Franco is over here or you may not feel you need any—but if—”

“James.” She deposits a light kiss to the top of his head to shut him up, much to his relief. “Thank you. And Robbie will be back by Hallowe’en. Because if he’s not back by Hallowe’en, I’ll hunt him down myself to keep him to whatever promise the two of you have made to me that I still know nothing about. Okay?”

He sighs and nudges his head further into the cushions and her touch.

“And in the meantime,” she says, after a beat. “You could consider this promotion.”

He exhales heavily. “Et tu, Brute.”

“Oh, stop that. You know Robbie would be pleased as anything to come back and find you an inspector.”

He knows that.

“And you're never going to work with Alan or John successfully, are you?”

“You’re sounding like Innocent again.”

“I'm not, you know. She thinks she shouldn’t accept that from you yet. Not before you’ve made a reasonable stab at being an acceptable team player. She’ll think it’s sheer stubborness and contrariness on your part.”

“Whereas you know I'm a hopeless case.” The thought brings him a warm relief. “I keep looking and it’s not him.”

Laura says nothing for a bit. Then one hand slips down and pats his cheek. “Have you moved into your cupboard yet?”

“It’s a multipurpose mezzanine space. And I will on Monday. They had to put cables in for the desk phone and computer. And a smoke alarm.” Sadly.

Her hands pause. “You’re not going into work on Monday,” she says.

“What? No-one said anything about that.”

“I’m saying it.”

“I really don’t think your remit extends that far round the nick.”

But she looks down at him, and he sees she’s not entertained at all. “You need to take a couple of days off.”

He frowns. It’s occurring to him that her remit extends just as far as he wants to let it. And Monday’s most-dreaded task, clearing Lewis’ desk, is not going to get any easier if he has to wait to do it. But this is the first time in weeks that he’s felt as if he could properly sleep. And if he does finally stop for a weekend off, he’s not sure he’ll be awake come Monday.

Laura’s hand rests on his forehead, spanning his thoughts, waiting. He knows, full well, how she struggles to make space to take back any of her accrued time in lieu. And yet she’s sacrificed this afternoon to sit on his couch and tend to his head when he hasn’t officially admitted he’s put himself in pain with his fall.  
  
For all the difference it’d make to anyone else if he turns up at work over the next few days, it would obviously make a difference to Laura if he could acknowledge her concern has roots.

“I don’t have a sickness absence cert,” he says, trying one foot on the road less travelled.

“Go to your GP on Monday. Tell them about the fall, and tell them you’ve not been sleeping. Ask for a cert to cover you until later in the week. You need a rest. You need to stop punishing yourself.” She punctuates her words with a light touch that takes the sting out of them, her fingers carding gently through his hair again. “I might take this little lot home for the weekend.” She nods, darkly, at the nearest set of files on the low shelf under his coffee table.

He’d nearly let her. She’d vanquish all the ghosts and make them behave better.

“Rest. Recuperation. No alcohol. None. Then rest again. Read a book once your head feels up to it. Whatever ridiculous tome you read for pleasure. Until then for goodness sake just lie here and—” She looks around his flat again, apparently in search of approved methods of passing his time. “ _Where_ has your television gone?”

“In that cabinet,” says James, amused. Laura would not make a good monk. He can kind of imagine her as an austere high-minded nun for about five minutes before she lost patience with the whole lot of them.

“We need BBC4 to start a daytime schedule just for you. To keep you on this couch.” He can tell when she spies his guitar. “And are you still playing?”  
  
“Yes,” he says. Too quickly. Although that much is true, strictly speaking. She must feel the flame of tension jumping upwards.

“What are you playing at the moment?”

He understands the question full well, from one performance ensemble musician to another. She doesn’t mean his own strummings. The amount of side-stepping it’s necessary to do with her is even worse than with Lewis. Lewis will give him a speaking look and lift his pint. Then he’ll let it sit between them briefly, in silence, before moving on to other things. Although he doesn’t forget. He reads volumes into James’ silences: chapter and verse. Laura just attacks on another flank. And James needs more phalanxes. They’re falling fast and dropping their guard. Felled by tiredness, the comfort of this couch he’d never realised was quite so very comfortable before, and her light, sure caresses.

She’ll think it’s because of the overworking, and it’s not.

“Have you been going to rehearsals?” she clarifies. “What did you mean earlier when you said the band ‘always had’ a lot on at Easter?”

He’d tried over the past few months. It hadn’t gone well. There’d been a sense of drifting misery that had kept him separate from everyone else. He can feel it now, just remembering. He shrugs, looking at her, wordless, and then winces. Laura presses her hands briefly to his temples, to steady him, and shakes her head right back at him in frustration. Which is just showing off, frankly.

“His awkward sod,” she mutters to herself.

If that’s Burns again—“Who’s that from?”

“No-one you need worry about just now. It’s a mantra I use in moments when you make me want to tear your hair out.”

“It’s ‘make me want to tear _my_ hair out’. As in: ‘working with Inspector Grainger makes me want to…’”

“Oh, you heard me right the first time.”

“That’s a pretty odd mantra.”

“Do you have any bald patches?”

“No,” says James, throughly distracted. He’s sincerely hoping that's not her way of breaking it to him. She's the one with a view of the top of his head.

“It’s been working overtime then. What’s yours? A little something light from Nietzsche?”

He makes an indignant noise. “Depends on the occasion.” Although, in all fairness—“Actually,” he says, eventually, “maybe it is a bit Beckett. These days it’s mostly ‘where the fuck _is_ he?’”

Her pause is almost as long as his. Then her hands stop, and a belated moment of catch-up later, the feeling of her touch recedes. His head feels cooler now. “Do you want an apposite poem for the occasion, James? Would that cheer you up?”

The prospect of sitting up seems a distant one, so he stays just where he is. He tells himself that maybe it’s okay that the head massage is finished. Before she extracts any more information through his scalp. He’d never known Monty was relinquishing state secrets with his purring. But Laura’s busy swiping at her phone.

“D’you keep a poetry archive on there?” he asks, curious. It would be one way to free up pocket space.

“No, James. I keep apps on my phone. Like most people. And there was a poem for the day recently that might appeal. Here.”

“I don’t know this one,” he says in surprise.

“Well, no-one knows all of Emily’s,” says Laura, reasonably. “A woman the world still hasn’t caught up with. But you should identify. She’s off on a different plane to the rest of us half the time too.”

He decides to ignore that in favour of properly unwrapping the gift of a poem in his hand, and he settles further back, peering at the screen.

‘We grow accustomed to the Dark -  
When Light is put away -’

He raises his head to look at her.

“The fourth verse in particular,” she tells him. “But you’ll take from it what you will.”

James swipes ahead.

‘The Bravest - grope a little -  
And sometimes hit a Tree  
Directly in the Forehead -’

“Oh, hilarious,” he tells her. She grins at him, but she turns her attention back out his window and leaves him to read the whole thing. And then read the last stanza again.

‘Either the Darkness alters -  
Or something in the sight  
Adjusts itself to Midnight -  
And Life steps almost straight.’

Whatever Emily is saying—and most of the deliciousness of Emily’s charged, mounting, potent fragments of thoughts is that no-one can articulate better than Emily what she says, even as her off-beats and wilful pauses strike their messages home—but whatever Emily is saying, James gets Laura’s message quite clearly.

He needs a new mantra.

When Laura nudges his shoulder gently, he realises he’s been quiet for a while.

“How’s that then?” she asks. He wonders if she’d ever put a poem in Lewis’ hand like this. He doubts it. Although she must have wanted to, sometimes. To suggest to him, too, that it might be possible to move a little forward without betraying the fact that something so very wrong had happened to his world.

James gives up his last deception to her in face of this.

“Better than feeling a funeral in my brain,” he admits. “There’s definitely mourners keeping treading to and fro.”

“Ah.” Her eyes soften. “With boots of lead, I take it? And a service like a drum, beating, beating by any chance?”

“Till I thought my mind was going numb.”

“Well. Let’s be glad sense has finally broken through then.” She sits upright. “I’ll see what you have in your medicine cabinet that’s safe for you to take. And make tea. You can have a weak cup of that.”

He does cheer up at this. “I have this unbelievably yellow mug you could use.”

And he’s about to point out that banning his Keats, only to provide Emily, is a pretty odd choice for telling him to move outside his own head. Until he realises, just in time, that Laura’s pointing him in the direction of some unobtrusive company who understands. And Emily will be good company for a bit. She knows both the sharp need for being alone and the conflicting restless pain of it. She’s achingly clear on all sorts of losses. She doesn’t shy away from things. Not even from the blunt, exhausting ache of being the one person left on a lonely quest.

But Laura’s not quite finished with poem-conveying Emily yet. She gives his shoulder a squeeze as she gets up. “You’re not wrecked solitary here, though, James,” she says. “However long he’s gone. You never are.”


	6. Chapter 6

James stops, halfway out the office door, because the nameplates have given him pause. He wonders whether to try angling an elbow to coax them out, onto the top of the box he’s hefting against his chest. Or let them wait until the next trip. He can already see he’s sorely underestimated just how many trips this morning is going to contain.

Faced with the reality of finally dismantling the workspace he’d shared with Lewis, he can privately admit he’s glad to have had those few Laura-prescribed days away from the nick. It’s made things feel more manageable.

Innocent sweeps past at a staccato clip, startling him. “It’s an _office_ you’ve been so generously allocated, Hathaway, not your own personal conservatory.”

He half-turns to stare after her, the yield of the cardboard around the hard edges of the files making a comforting pressure against his chest. But she’s certainly distracted him from any risky stirrings of nostalgia. He’s still trying to work that one out when he reaches his newly-built door. And it becomes much clearer.

There are plants. Quite a lot of plants. They’re balanced along the narrow window ledge and sitting in a triangular arrangement on top of his filing cabinet. One is even trailing its fronds cheerfully downwards from where it’s been jammed, high up on the wall, between two pipes. They all look like the mystery plants in Lewis’ kitchen. 

James rotates carefully, still holding his box, examining them. They’re labelled with dates from the past few months, and the plants get incrementally bigger as the dates become more recent.

Laura has been replacing her plant at Lewis’ with a slightly bigger one every few weeks.

In contrast, she’s kindly left the logical place to put this new forest, the surface of his brand new desk, perfectly clear. Apart from a post-it. He cranes his neck to peer at her writing upside-down. _To ease the monastic vibe_ , it says.

And it would probably have achieved a less macabre look if she hadn’t appropriated specimen labels from her lab. But he finds he doesn’t mind. The overall effect is so cheering that he’d leave them all there exactly as she’s arranged them. If Innocent didn’t so obviously think he was making a point about the size of his new office.

=

It’s quickly emerging that the body Laura is attending to is not a suspicious. It’s still a body on the riverbank. But it won’t be Grainger’s responsibility, which means in turn it won’t be James’. Laura’s verdict is a likely coronary. Uniform have been summoned to collect ID for next of kin duties but have managed to get themselves snarled up in a traffic incident, which James is feeling vaguely virtuous for managing to get here ahead of.

The emergency call had come in from the cox of an early morning rowing eight. Which is fairly typical, James privately feels, of both Oxford and its rowers. A Cambridge crew would have had sufficient focus to literally not notice a dead body on the bank. Or their coach would’ve had something to say about it. He’d enjoy informing Laura of this, if Grainger wasn’t unfortunately here.

Because it’s also still the body of a middle-aged jogger, who has died on the river path early on this midsummer’s morning, when the long grass is still damp with dew and the entire of Oxford from down here shines like the water. No foul play suspected of anyone but the universe.

And, while SOCO have been stood down, Laura has stayed kneeling beside the deceased, in her white scene suit, looking thoughtful. When they’d arrived, she’d had that inward look that had put James in mind of how Lewis gets whenever they’re called to the body of a woman who would be his Lyn’s age. Lewis tends to mutter something about them being young and go beady-eyed for a bit. Laura has dispatched her assistant on ahead to the morgue and is waiting to supervise transport of the deceased herself. James takes another look at the body, from this angle, and he sees that the tall wiry frame and grey hair means that at first glance he wouldn’t look unlike—he can tell she wouldn’t mind a bit of brief distraction.

Two months on, and the only remnant of his clash with the tree root is a tenderness remaining under the skin. It’s barely perceptible to the eye unless, as now, he angers it by rubbing his forehead absently as they all silently survey the wrongness of this early morning tableau and fail to come up with something to say. He clocks that Laura is giving him a glare and quickly folds his arms instead. He hadn’t much succeeded in leaving it alone when it had been scarring over. Which was how he’d learnt she’s not above swatting his hand away from it.

“Thanks, Laura,” Grainger says. “You can manage without me until they get here, can you, Hathaway?”

“Will do my best,” James says earnestly.

There’s a gentle cough from the region of the deceased. When James looks down, as Grainger turns his attention to his phone, Laura arches an eyebrow at him.

She rises and stands beside him as they both watch Grainger retreating down the river path until he’s out of earshot.

“One of these days,” she says, “he is going to see through that little act. And where will you be then?”

“In a state of complete and utter astonishment,” James tells her. “Honestly, Laura, I’d prefer to work with Peterson.”

“You should tell Alan that. In exactly that tone of voice. And I only hope I’m there the day you forget yourself and play disingenuous in front of Jean.”

James lets his expression convey the vanishing likelihood of that ever happening.

“Or,” says Laura, thoughtful, “when you find yourself in a review with him and Jean and have to keep up the act.”

That one hadn’t actually occurred to him. He considers it and the play of light on the river, that’s making the water shimmer and seem to reform itself as it drifts on past them. “God, Peterson actually would be the better choice there,” he despairs. “But it’s just me and her in this review. It’s my project she’s reviewing.”

He’s cautiously hopeful he’s moved enough cases forward to justify it going fulltime.

“You do seem to be John’s sergeant of choice, these days. Although isn’t calling him Inspector Grainger a bit formal? Even for you?” Her eyes are bright and curious now, assessing him. She’s asking if, contrary to appearances, this is working after all. It’s not.

“That’s his name.” He has been spending a lot of time with Grainger lately. Or maybe it just feels like it. “I bet it’s that Peterson’s given up his part shares in me so Grainger’s had to take over.”

Her eyebrows censure him this time. James has learnt that she’s as stalwart as Lewis in believing in his worth. But Laura’s faith amuses him in how different it is, being as it’s tempered by a strong dose of realism about his shortcomings. Shortcomings which Lewis, stalwartly, refuses to see.

“Neither of them are going to stop requesting you. It’s far more likely Jean has decided to stop shoving you from pillar to post, and she thinks Grainger is the better fit for you. He is, on paper. He’s been a solid, reliable copper since before you were born. He’s straightforward. Trustworthy. All words you could use to describe Robbie, incidentally.”

“Yes, but they don’t sum Lewis up,” James says, wondering what words Laura would currently use to do so. It’s how Lewis would describe himself too, but James pays no heed to that.

“We don’t all have stores of brilliantly esoteric knowledge to draw from to solve cases. Sparked by flashes of insight from a partner who’s honed some sort of paranormal copper’s intuition.”

“You can be solid without being so—” He runs out of words. He’s busy turning over this shining description of his working partnership with Lewis in his mind. She makes it sound like alchemy. “Grainger never wants to follow a theory until so much evidence has weighted in that it’s piling on top of us. He makes crime boring.”

“Sounds like an _excellent_ new slogan for the force,” Laura says, crinkling her eyes against the glare of the sun on the river and at him. “Oxfordshire’s Finest. They make crime boring.”

She’s become almost impossible to beat in an argument recently. It’s very worrying. James’ intellect is obviously suffering from being reigned in by Grainger.

‘ _Well. Let’s not jump to any conclusions_ ,’ he’ll say, if James merely shares a pretty mild Shakespearean allegory that links the supposedly unlinked suspects. While eyeing James in a way that suggests that he’s just had every odd rumour he’s heard about Hathaway more than him confirmed. Because James has genuinely tried now. Or it certainly feels like he has, which may or may not be the same thing.

Maybe his antipathy does have a little to do with being given to Grainger, after all, so many years later. As if that part of James, which had later turned out to be his heart, had never followed its instincts, just for once, when it counted, and claimed Lewis so very fast.

He tends to feel guilty for being frustrated by Grainger and resolves to do it differently. Then he works with him again, and the frustration overtakes the guilt. Powers lengths ahead in fact, washing down guilt in its wake.

“Isn’t it awful,” Laura asks, “when on closer acquaintanceship, it turns out someone doesn't even have the courtesy to have enough faults for you to hang your dislike on?”

He shoots her a look. “I never claimed to be reasonable.”

She laughs. “When’s this review happening?”

“The first Thursday in July. I think it’ll be okay.” There are one or two new, promising almost-leads that he’s quite impatient to share with Innocent and see what can come of them.

Laura is still looking at him, amused.

“And how are…things?” he asks.

This has become acceptable established code. The first time he’d asked ultra-politely after Franco; Laura had asked equally politely after Monty. He’d knocked that one off in a hurry. These days, he only asks when he’s capable of asking properly.

“Things are good, James.” She eyes him for a moment. “In fact, the start of next month is when I fly out to Germany, so you’ll have to text me and tell me the outcome of your review.”

“—Germany?”

“Yes. I’m not too sure—” She stops. “Just for a week, James.”

“Oh. Yes. I see.” He takes in a breath of air that still has some early morning coolness in it after all.

“Franco is moving back over here permanently, eventually, you know. He may not know it yet, but he is. I’m not going to do a disappearing act.”

“Good to know,” James hears himself say. “About the disappearing act, I mean. I don’t want to become a beermat collector. Although I’d happily house sit your house.”

“And drown my plants? No thanks.” But she gives his arm a quick squeeze as she says it, even though she’ll have to reglove for that. He looks down at her.

“You should visit your aunt out at Witney before you go. Or you’ll be past your six week mark.”

He watches her work out that he has that right and shake her head at him. He’s been saving that one up for ages. “It’s like having a deranged speaking diary app,” she tells the deceased. “One that thinks it can hold you to account.” Then she glances up. “I’d ask you how things are, but so help me if you say you’re fine you’re getting Roget’s for your next birthday. With lots of helpful synonyms ringed in red.”

“Well now you’ve spoilt the surprise. As well as a really exciting book.”

Laura lets her expression do the talking.

“The project is going well, anyway,” he qualifies.

“Okay, James.” She looks down the towpath to where a squad car has pulled up, and they watch as it decants a pair of constables. When she looks back at him, her eyes make clear contact as only Laura’s eyes quite can, in that way that tells him she’s stopped the teasing. “Good luck with Jean then on…”

“Thursday week,” he confirms. “Enjoy Germany.”

=

Innocent is keeping him waiting. Which isn’t enough in itself to unnerve him, but her continued perusal of his report certainly is. It makes little sense. He knows none of the recommendations he’s made are contentious. He’s either done enough to justify the project, or, for some reason possibly predetermined by budgetary constraints and the current phase of the political moon, it’s not a productive use of manpower—meaning him—and she’ll call a reasoned, regretful and unarguable halt to it.

But he can’t imagine what would give her this sort of pause.

She puts her pen down on the open file, and still she says nothing for a moment. Then she levels a look at him. “I hadn’t intended for you to become a one-man specialist crime-fighting unit.”

“Ma’am?

“The sample cold cases you’ve been pulling. Why are they all missing persons?”

There’s a silence as he takes this in. Somewhere in the outer office a phone is ringing. And the summer rain against her window is catching the sunlight at the corner of his vision, making it harder to focus as he suddenly, sharply, needs to. Because not all. Not, he could say, carefully—all.

“No. There are a number of aggravated burglary cases and—”

She gestures this away. “Which I agree it’s well worth considering are more related than originally thought. You know that the primary suspect in one of them was picked up years later on a similar charge? Very promising. But why is the bulk of your work—” Her eyebrows draw together as she comes to a halt. “You didn't know,” she says, ruefully. “You didn’t realise you’d chosen so many.”

This is not how this was supposed to go. “It’s just a sample set. I’ll eventually get to the other cases from that year—”

“You were asked to take a particular time period, James. Not to focus so strongly on a particular theme.”

“I did find—”

“I know. You’ve done well with them. Especially in terms of the amount of cases you’ve moved forwards. But there are other priorities for the force at the moment than focusing so much of yourself—other cold cases where new forensics, in particular, could make more of an immediate difference.” He can’t say he does them in his own time. That would make this worse. “Do you remember,” she asks, “that that was part of the brief?”

“Yes,” he says, automatically, and too quickly. In truth, parts of his memory of that conversation with her are vague. It had been the evening when she’d let him know it was time to pack up Lewis’ things and move out of their office. It had become the evening when he’d fallen out with Laura. But Innocent had said—about bringing new forensics to shed new light on old cases. As well as new knowledge. She had probably meant forensics, with their promisingly straightforward concrete results in terms of case-solve rates, far more than she’d meant using new knowledge on the cases where he thought he’d been solving the puzzles. Discerning what might have happened to the people who have gone missing.

“I can broaden the scope,” he says.

She’s looking at him, thoughtful. “Just because you’re good at this, James. Successful. It doesn’t mean—you’re not just a resource to be deployed. We have to be mindful of its impact on you. And I’m not sure that working so much in isolation is the best idea.”

“I can handle it,” he says, quickly. As he’d said, all those months ago, in this office. He sees her eyes flicker with the memory of it too.

This time, when she says it, her tone is kinder than then; “You won’t have to.”

He struggles to keep calm, so he doesn’t betray what the reminder has done to him. “So I’m to go back on the rota, fulltime,” he checks. He thinks his tone is acceptably neutral.

“Well, let’s not rush straight into anything. You never came back to me with your thoughts on that inspector’s post—” She sees his expression. “Give it some thought now, perhaps, and come back to me on Monday.” She closes the file. “I’m not saying this won’t help our statistics. It’s very insightful. Particularly if those burglary cases turn out to be connected. And it will help the department in other ways—it’s very promising as a pilot study for a way of working we could certainly consider using again, at a later stage.” Although not, James sees, one that he’ll get to follow.

“Ma’am,” he says, as he turns to leave.

And stops in his tracks at the door, almost colliding with the ghost of his younger self coming in. On his way to tell Innocent that he’s stumbled across the man who’d killed Lewis’ wife. Equally helpless and brought up short, having reached the end of any way he knows how to deal with this.

Another ghost. He thinks he’s going mad. In true Prince of Denmark fashion.

“Hathaway?”

The door handle is pressing hard in the palm of his hand. He half-turns back to stare out her window.

“Would you mind, ma’am—could you just tell me if he's alright?”

“James.”

He's forced to look at her.

“Do you honestly think I wouldn't tell you if anything like that happened?”

He gives her a jerky nod. It's not meant to be so stiff, but he feels he's made a fool of himself and somehow, judging from the look on her face, dismayed her that he’d felt he’d even need to check—but it isn’t a lack of trust in her, he’d simply reached the point where it had finally become intolerable not to ask.

“Come back here and sit down.”

He can't find a reasonable way to refuse. He approaches the desk again, but stays standing in front of her, and focuses over her head.

“I’d never have put you in this halfway house of not-knowing if I’d had my way.”

He glances down in surprise. And he sees that he won’t get away with deflecting her this time, it’s much worse than that; she’s looking prepared to be highly sympathetic. She nods at the chair again.

Then there’s the wonderfully jarring sound of her telephone, which is more musical at this moment than the bells of Oxford to James.

She looks at it so impatiently, as she picks it up, that he wonders how it wasn’t quelled into silence years ago. “I’m in the middle of—” Her expression changes rapidly. James, in the face of his own reprieve, finds it hard to feel concern for whoever is the subject of this fresh crisis. “Put them through.” She gives him a grimace of apology. He summons a suitably regretful look in response and makes very good his escape. He can feel her gaze settle on his back as he reaches the door again.

It’s far past the right time for a smoke break. It’s drawing into early evening now, and the air is still damp between the disillusioning flurries of July rain. But he bends his head into the remnants of the drizzle, jamming his hands into his trouser pockets to override the shaky feeling, and takes the long way around to the coffee place. He waits for a cigarette until he reaches the relative shelter of its awning.

He is adjusting to this. Whatever Innocent may think from his slip-up there. Adjusted. He’s fine. A bit tired. But otherwise he’s fine. It’s just when it unexpectedly comes up again—

Oddly though, he feels a bit the better for it. As if a wound he hadn’t realised he was still carrying has been lanced.

His desk phone is ringing when he gets back to his office, having returned via the back stairs to avoid one of Innocent’s casual ambushes. He’s not surprised to see it’s her office number. But since she’s not calling his mobile, it’s not a call out, and she’s letting him be if he’s still on a break.

James decides to be still on a break.

He could, of course, genuinely head off home. Two birds, one stone. Demonstrate an appropriate work life balance and put off her talk until Monday. And hope, fervently, that the academics of Oxford lose their senses again and start murdering one another on the weekend.

The latest skirmish in their battle over his hours is that she’s taken to making odd checks on him, last thing. James, in response, has taken to sliding out for a cigarette around the time she leaves. He figures her next move will be to start varying her time.

He could concede this evening to her.

Or he could search, one last time, through this file which has turned out to be the last file he’ll get to work on, for anything that could have been missed, anything to explain what’s happened and why.

The chill from the dampness outside is still lying over him, just over his skin. He hangs his suit jacket over the back of his chair and tries to shake off the feeling with a shrug; dropping into the chair and pulling himself into the desk. He settles himself with his head on one cool hand, to lose himself in the file.

Until a broad hand lands on his shoulder; pressing warmly through the cotton of his shirt.

James doesn’t turn around. Because that’s a touch that’s laying a claim to him like no-one else does. He stills instead, and he fights silently; not to give in, not to lean back helplessly into it, not to succumb to the whole crushing weight of the last eight months bearing down on him now.

The hand grips his shoulder a little harder, in encouraging fashion.

James doesn’t turn around until he’s sure.

“You owe me a pint,” says Lewis.


	7. Chapter 7

Progress through the nick is remarkably and bewilderingly swift.

Lewis raises a hand and summons a smile, keeps a hand on James’ elbow and a steer to his back; and somehow they’re outside. James stops, at the top of the steps, needing to turn his head for another look. Lewis is scanning the car park.

“That still yours?”

“What?”

“Your car. I had a lift here.”

“Oh. Yes.”

When the car doors close, a muffled thud and one to follow, they’re left there looking at each other, walled off from all the rest of it.

“James,” says Lewis, after a moment, with a half-nod. As if it’s the start of a conversation. Or an instruction that never comes after all. “James.” Like he’s trying out the name again to see if it still fits.

“Sir.”

Lewis’ mouth crinkles, and the lines around his eyes deepen. There are new lines, and James doesn’t know what’s put them there. They deepen again, as Lewis takes his time looking at James. “You alright?” he asks.

“Am I—but where were you? How come they let you come back? Are you alright?”

Lewis doesn’t look like a man who’s come from a day in court. He’s wearing his own version of weekend clothes, which, for him, means jeans and a soft checked shirt. The darker green in this particular shirt must be what’s making his eyes a deeper blue. There’s a lift to the corners of his mouth still, from the ‘ _sir_ ,’ that makes James want to reach out for him.

Whenever James has to go and inform people that someone of theirs is hurt, the silence in the car will often be broken with a half-apologetic: ‘I just need to set eyes on him. See for myself that he’s alright.’ It’s never true. Seeing is never enough. They find they need to reach, and that’s barely enough still, so an embrace becomes a clasp as they try to remove every atom of the distance they now know could have separated them for good. James understands this now on a cellular level. Every atom of him is yearning to reach out for Lewis and hold on, and those that make up his heart especially are warring with the part of his mind that’s still operational, for denying them this. It’s taking everything he has not to bury himself in Lewis’ shoulder and not come up for air. He wants to reach out and pull Lewis right against him, to check him for hidden wounds, to check that he’s still warm, in his Lewis-way, all over. He wants to raise his hand and trace those new little lines with his fingertip and smooth them completely away. He wants to plant his head in the crook of Lewis’ neck so badly that he can hardly focus.

“I’m fine, James,” says Lewis. “I’m well. Just—can we head home first? Before someone else comes along and asks in hushed tones how I am? Innocent tells me I’ve got some sort of manly medical problem.”

“Your prostate,” says James, still woefully distracted.

“That’s the one. But I’ve recovered now.” There’s a complicit smile half-promising to break through.

“Looks like it,” James says, his eyes still fixed on him. Because Lewis does looks well. Underneath it all. He looks tired, but he looks well.

“I had a right time of it getting from her office to that cupboard they’ve put you in. Dodging everybody’s enquiries. How did you land up in there?”

“Innocent—” He can’t seem to think straight. He’s just been shepherded out of work without even signing out. Lewis has gently marshalled him straight past the desk. James wishes someone could marshall his scattered thoughts for him. They’ve not only been bowled over like so many ninepins, they’re still on the ground, rolling in all directions. “I should—”

He feels in his pocket for his phone, to call in. Pulling up the number is going to be much more difficult than usual because his eyes keep flitting sideways of their own accord, for reassurance.

Lewis reaches out and rests that warm, steadying hand briefly on his arm, a half-squeeze, to stop him. “Don’t worry about all that. I told Innocent I was taking you.”

“You did?” James asks, fascinated. “Did you?”

“Not in so many words. But she’ll know I’ve got you. You’re not going absent without leave.”

“Unlike some,” James tries. Lewis’ mouth gives a brief smile. So they’re not going to be able to joke their way out of this one. Then James remembers. “Oh. Monty. I have him.”

“Ah, I thought you would,” says Lewis, pleased. “I thought so. Look—let’s go by yours to get your stuff, and you could stop over in the spare room if you like. This could take a few beers.”

James wonders what it is about him that suggests he’s in any fit state to drive.

=

“I just put it in the door earlier,” Lewis says, nudging aside a wheeled suitcase to clear their path into his flat, and leaving James to shut the door behind them. James casts a quick look at the case before he follows. Exhibit A. One plain, innocuous-looking piece of luggage with no immediate sign of any residue from an airline label. Because he’s gleaned no information whatsoever on the short car journey. Lewis had been doing his inspecting-Oxford bit in the car, putting James in mind of the first time he’d driven him in the city. Except that the silence this time had been so different, and broken by a mildly amused ‘eyes on the road’ caution from Lewis.

“I did notice, though,” Lewis continues, leading him into the kitchen to cautiously set the wicker-contained Monty down, “that I wasn’t trampling a mountain of letters underfoot.” He’s treating his flat to his first-impressions-of-the-crime-scene look now.

“Oh. I forgot. I’ve some of your letters at mine.”

“I’ve managed without them long enough. Another night’s not going to do any harm—” says Lewis. Then he cuts himself off, confused “— you entering for a horticultural competition?”

James takes a moment to admire his own handiwork and align one of the pots in his neatly regimented line.

“I won one,” he tells Lewis.

“And you thought you’d use my kitchen as some sort of potting shed?”

“Innocent didn’t much appreciate it when I had them in my office.”

“Right,” says Lewis, perplexed.

“What kind of plant are they? Laura still won’t tell me.”

“No idea. They were on the drooping desperate shelf in Sainsbury’s; they’d lost their labels. Two for a quid. Why have you—”

“No. Hold on. We’ve been trying to keep plants flourishing that you only picked up because they were on their last legs?”

“They were a bargain. Look how many cuttings you got. For fifty pence.”

“They’re not cuttings! They’re whole new plants Laura bought.” Although, as it transpires, she’s just been casually picking them up with her shopping to wind James up.

“Well what did she want do that for?”

“This is just so typical. God, I forgot how you do this.” Lewis has this habit of defusing things so prosaically that James is torn between amusement, annoyance and pure chagrin.

“What? Buy plants? I don’t usually.”

James shakes his head and sets down the beer carrier he’s holding. They’d stopped off at Lewis’ local shops for the most essential of provisions to restock his kitchen. The off-license had been left up to James, and he’d done his best with local craft beers to toast Lewis’ return.

He’s glad he’d thought to go for ready-chilled because less than five minutes after they’ve entered the flat they’re sitting on Lewis’ couch. Lewis has reclaimed one of his beer glasses and left James to it, with a cold bottle to hold, the way he likes it.

Monty has shot back under the kitchen radiator.

Lewis takes an appraising first sip and seems pretty satisfied with it, sinking back into the couch. James wonders which local breweries he’s now comparing the beer of Oxford to and if that’s a way in to get some answers. “You must have missed this,” he says, regarding the bottle in his hand.

But Lewis’ eyes turn soft and pleased, and he sends him a smile. “Aye,” he says. “You could say I did, James.”

Lewis clicks his tongue at Monty to console him, and James stretches his legs out with a sigh. He’s crammed into the corner of the couch once again because Lewis always drops down in the middle. James’ feet have to negotiate for space around the legs of the coffee table, and the arm of the couch is digging companionably into his side. There’s far less room than there has been, and he hadn’t remembered it was possible to feel so relaxed in the space that Lewis makes for him. The joy that bubbles up so suddenly within him comes from a deeper groundspring than he’d known it was possible for him to draw from.

“I was glad we’d just had a pint,” Lewis says, watching Monty stick a cautious paw out into no man’s land and then think the better of it and withdraw. “You know. Right before.”

“Where were you? Sir?”

“Not at liberty to reveal that.”

“But you’ve briefed Innocent,” James checks. He’s wondering at that case set just inside the door, earlier. The urgency of that.

“It wasn’t a briefing,” says Lewis decidedly.

“Okay, but—”

Lewis looks at him and puts down his glass, deciding to answer the question that wasn’t asked. “I didn’t linger, James. It was no more than a courtesy call. I knocked on her door and said I was back. She said she’d just heard that but she was more than happy to see me herself. Much better standard of welcome I got off her than the first time I came back from other parts. I thanked her and said I’d fill her in another time but just now I thought I’d best be having a word with my sergeant. She said she thought that was the most intelligent idea anyone had come up with since I left. And then she directed me to you in the mop cupboard. What the hell were you doing in there?”

“She did not call it that.”

“She had to when I let on I’d no idea what an multipurpose mezzanine space was.”

He’s the first person to get the name right.

“Then she muttered something about how she should have remembered I have a habit of showing up at apposite moments. I thought she said opposite and was having a go at me for being contrary. I said that was a bit harsh and me just back, ma’am. She rolled her eyes, and it felt like I hadn’t been gone five minutes.” Lewis settles down a little further, and his knee brushes against James’ thigh. His look, right beside James, is curious. “So I turned up at just the right time, is that it?”

“No.” It comes out too abruptly. But the right moment to return had come and gone, hopelessly, on the day that James had first learnt Lewis was gone, and on every other difficult day since.

It’s too late to tone it down or take it back because Lewis has already taken it in. James tries to distract himself with a pull of his beer. “Go on, then,” he hears Lewis say, after a moment. “How about you fill me in on what you’ve been doing to the poor woman to get yourself put in a cupboard?”

“It’s an office.”

“They’ve never given the mops their own office?”

James glares at him. “Not the mops. Me. And it’s a converted storage room. You know it hasn’t been a cleaning cupboard for years.”

“Aye. I remember. That’s because back in my day the mops protested and got themselves moved to a bigger one. Demanded a bit more space.”

“She was pretty clear it wasn’t a punishment.”

“I see,” says Lewis, nodding. “And what, exactly, were you not being punished for, Sergeant?”

Oh, God. Lewis has managed to get to the heart of the matter worryingly quickly. And James is out of practice. He’s forgotten how to defend himself when Lewis looks at him, relaxed and indulgent like this, and yet so focused, like all he wants is the answer, and the answer can’t possibly be a problem, whatever it is. James exhales. “I told Laura. Not the illness story. I told her why you’d really gone.”

Lewis studies him. And James should be more repentant under his scrutiny, but the sheer injustice and fear of that first morning is swelling up again, and it’s still, all this time later, impossible to summon anything resembling an apology for his actions.

“And I take it that didn’t go down too well? With Innocent?”

James winces involuntarily.

Lewis gifts him with a proper laugh. “You know, I’m beginning to suspect that when she muttered ‘ _Thank God,_ ’ when I appeared in her doorway it was less genuine gratitude to the Almighty at this evidence I was okay. Or even that she’d been feeling the sore lack of my skills round the nick. And more that she wouldn’t have to deal with you herself anymore.”

“Quite likely,” James agrees.

Lewis picks up his glass, with a nod at him. “Well. Thank you,” he says.

James nods back at him, surprised. But he barely has a moment to register relief.

“And how is she?” Lewis asks.

“Innocent?” James hedges. “Much the same. A bit more difficult, truth to tell. Without you there to head her off at the pass.”

“Laura,” says Lewis. Firmly.

He should have known they’d do this to him. It’s like they’re bloody well determined that his place is slap bang in the middle of every complication in their relationship. There’s a distinct feeling of inevitability to this moment. But he’s not about to let Lewis, all oblivious, call Laura in the middle of her time away with Franco. He’s not about to let that go badly for Lewis, or for Laura, if he can give fair warning, and mitigate the blow a bit.

He’s never setting foot in his local Indian restaurant again, though. Laura had been right; she and Franco can keep it.

“She’s in Germany,” he says.

“Germany?”

“Just for a week.”

“What brings her there?”

“More like who.”

“I see,” says Lewis. Waiting. This would be so much easier if he actually did.

“I don’t think she’s taking her commitment to her new Thursday book group at all seriously, incidentally.”

Lewis continues to look at him.

James casts his eyes up to the ceiling and gives it up. “She’s not by herself. You remember her friend with the unfortunate name, who appeared during the Gansa case?”

Lewis grimaces. Although it’s impossible to know whether that’s to do with the memory of Franco, the attack by Bethan Vickery, the sum total of human misery on that case, or Lewis having been forced into a series of interactions with a psychiatrist. “I remember the bloke called after a Spanish dictator; he was German,” he says, thoughtfully. “I remember you ran into Laura with him at your local where they do that very decent lamb pasanda.”

“Yes,  _my_  local,” says James, sitting up, “Kindly tell Laura—never mind.”

“He’s reappeared, is that it?”

James is certainly not about to mention that he was never quite disappeared. There are limits. “I saw them there again.”

“When was this?”

“It was a couple of months ago.” That’s the closest he’s coming to the truth. Lewis and Laura can sort all the rest of that out themselves.

“And she’s alright?”

“Well. Yes,” says James, astonished.

“She’s over there visiting him?”

“More like she went over there with him—he’s split between working here and there now.” He stares at Lewis.

“What?”

“But—last time there was a three act drama when she just had dinner with the bloke. Sir.” And its very much unwanted sequel when James had spotted them again, but he’s not about to go into that. That’s more his and Laura’s business, after all, than Lewis or Franco's.

Lewis has the grace to look embarrassed. “Lot of water under the bridge,” he starts, in an uneasy dismissal. And then he reconsiders James, and he visibly changes his mind. “Ah, look. And maybe that means there’s been a year or two since then for me to simmer down and have a think about whether all of that was justified. I’m not such an old stick in the mud that I can’t see when I haven’t been fair to her.”

“You never said.”

But of course Lewis didn’t. They don’t. He can see why Lewis looks a bit taken aback at that. They don’t say. They drink pints, and they make marks on beermats, sometimes not with glass rims, and they let those things, and their own rituals and patterns, mark the passage of time. And that had always been enough to carry them through. James could never have anticipated the pain that Lewis, going in the midst of that, would leave behind him. The silence of all the unspoken things that had descended on him.

He also feels a right fool. He’d defended Lewis’ honour when Lewis wouldn’t have wanted it defended.

Lewis is still looking at him. “I’ll tell you one thing about witness protection. A man has a lot of time on his hands to think. I never asked for any promises from her, James. Nor made any to her. And I hadn’t any regrets about how things were left with her. I didn’t feel I’d missed a chance I should have taken.”

Laura had been right. She’d known. Just as she’d found it easier to move on from wanting more from Lewis while he wasn’t cropping up, ambushing her, Lewis has obviously also found he didn’t feel the loss of her—quite like that.

Although that’s certainly not to say—“But she did miss you,” James tells him.

“Aye. I know. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t have more than welcomed the chance to bend her ear over a pint on many’s the occasion. But I didn’t—I wasn’t worried about her when I went. I knew she’d be okay. Besides,” says Lewis, comfortably, with a look of amusement at James, “I knew you’d keep an eye."

“That was so much the other way round.”

“I see. And why was that?”

James says nothing. Although he considers lawyering up. It isn’t possible for one man, undefended, to hold up against this level of questioning when it’s backed up by such a close and interested gaze. And Lewis, for all his musing tones, is just as familiarly, sharply intuitive as ever. He’s not missing a trick. All the interrogation skills he’s been storing up since he left are being casually, persistently, and unerringly directed straight at anything he could have missed while he was gone. Having him so confusingly present again is pulling at things within James, and there’s an unfamiliar ache to just relinquish all of it, everything that’s happened, to hand it over to Lewis to take care of. No wonder the suspects confess. James takes a fortifying breath, and another strong swallow of his beer, and swallows down the impulse to come clean on what the last eight months have really been like.

“Anyway,” says Lewis, straightening upright beside him. “Best let her know I’m back.” And he’s up, and headed for where the landline lives in the hall, before James has processed this.

“You can’t just ring her and—Sir? Let me at least talk to her first—”

Lewis delivers a swift wink at him as he moves out of sight.

Monty stirs, undecided, at this disturbance and eyes the invitation of the open door to the hallway.

“Laura?” comes Lewis’ voice. Then, after a pause, James hears him laugh.

James shakes his head at Monty, wordless, and picks up his beer.

The next time he tunes back in, it’s because of a shift in Lewis’ tone. “He what?” Lewis says, and then ambles down to casually, but firmly, shove the door closed. James frowns at it. But Monty has made his way over to leap up, warm, into his lap, and he’s back on Lewis’ couch. And Lewis is here, so close that James can hear the timbres of his voice, fading and swelling as he paces the hallway, approaching and retreating, but as constant in his tones as the underlying roar of the tide coming in. James feels like falling asleep to it.

After a while he’s amused to realise, from the length of the lulls, that Laura is doing most of the talking. Hopefully, James imagines, recovering from the shock enough to give Lewis a piece of her mind. And as if on cue, there’s a deeper laugh from Lewis. Because part of Lewis is enjoying this. Thoroughly enjoying startling people with his unannounced, unceremonious, Lazarus-like reappearance. James ought to throttle him. Because even Laura can hardly manage it down a phoneline.

When Lewis returns, he drops right down beside James again, letting his knee knock against James’ companionably as he resettles. He seems distracted. James waits, unsure, letting his fingers splay and massage deeply, fondling Monty’s neck.

“She seems happy?” Lewis asks, eventually.

“Didn’t you ask her that? Sir?”

“Not directly. The bloke was there. Probably listening.”

I’ll bet he was, James reflects. Franco’s probably not thrilled that this police inspector has rung, out of the blue, just when he’s managed to persuade Laura off to his home turf. Laura, James realises with enjoyment, will be quite amused by that.  
  
Lewis takes a pull of his beer. “We’ll need to check him out, though,” he says.

“Count me out,” says James hastily.

“I wasn’t saying I was about to hold a dinner party for them when they got back.”

“Well. No.”

“Ah, I didn’t tell you. I can cook now.”

“Are you sure? I mean—how come—”

“I took one of those classes. Part of my identity was to have moved into the area for a new lease of life in retirement. I had to actively have these interests.” He says it, James notices, intrigued, like someone who’d had to have vaccinations for an overseas trip. “And the teacher reckoned I have a distinctly original approach towards flavourings. I was more thinking of telling Laura to invite him along some evening for a pint, though.”

“Right,” says James, a little alarmed by what feels like a coded warning from this mysterious cooking teacher. “But you can do the heavy-handed father of the groom routine all by yourself, sir. And the very Best of British to you.” Although maybe Laura would let James prop up the bar and watch. Franco might well be resigned to James silently appraising him as part of the package Laura comes with by now.

“Why, have you met him?”

James considers this thorny question. “Does a mutual exchange of mistrustful glances count?”

“You’ve never managed to get on the wrong side of this Franco already? Without even speaking to him?”

James is about to object to the sheer hypocrisy of this when he registers that Lewis sounds as if he’s appreciating the idea. He wants Franco to be confirmed as decent for Laura’s sake but not necessarily liked by his sergeant. His reaction to Laura’s heart being properly claimed by someone else at last is mixed with a certain residual possessiveness. Which sounds about right. So it seems only fair to let him know—James thinks of how she’s been over the past few months, of that muddled evening, especially, on his couch after A&E, and of how she’s become impossible to beat in verbal sparring contests.

“The evidence I’ve pieced together,” he tells Lewis, “indicates that he’s the prime suspect for her recent prolonged positive affect.”

“That’ll do,” says Lewis, closing down the discussion in what looks remarkably like relief. “You hungry yet?”

Thankfully, that turns out to be an invitation to argue over what to phone in as an order. Lewis turns on the highlights of the days play at Lords while they’re waiting. His local Chinese takeaway seems delighted to have him back. There’s an entire heap of fortune cookies.

“Don’t open that,” says James, dropping a chopstick and reaching for Lewis’ wrist. “It’ll say you’re going on an unexpected journey.”

“Will it? What’ll yours say then?”

James considers this.  _Something you thought lost will turn up again_. “A tall, dark, mysterious inspector will startle you out of one of your nine lives and reclaim your cat. I mean, your cat.”

Lewis places a hand on his shoulder as he gets up to get them another beer. “Eat your dinner.”

James looks up at him, startled. He hasn’t been casually owned and instructed, in a way that goes straight to his heart, since Lewis went. He feels a bit lightheaded to be beginning on another beer. “Actually, sir,” he tries, “if you’re finished…” And he starts to fish in his pocket for his cigarette packet.

Lewis rolls his eyes in exasperation, and the look is so familiar that James is still smiling as he steps outside. Where his feet stutter. He misses the feeling of warmth immediately. Like the sun going behind a cloud when you’re lying on the grass.

He swings around and turns abruptly back into the flat.

Lewis looks up, surprised. “Forget your lighter—James?”

“No.”

His brow furrows. “Have you been ill this winter?”

“No.”

James doesn't think that counts as a lie. It’s not like he had the flu. Lewis, sitting on his couch petting Monty, as if none of this had ever happened, is far too pragmatic to include heartsick or heartsore, or the raw ache of being the one left behind and not knowing, as an illness.

“Second innings,” Lewis says, with his eyes still on James's face.

James takes the excuse gladly. The cricket commentary is soothing in itself. Soporific. Lewis’ shoulder brushes against his again each time one of them takes a drink. And outside it’s the mid-lenght of a long Summer’s twilight.

He’s sinking into it, and trying to let it all wash over him and quell his mind’s restless murmurings, when his phone buzzes with an incoming text. He levers it out of his pocket.

“Laura says that if you’ve given me a cardiac arrest showing up like that, she’s perfectly willing to certify your idiocy as my cause of death,” he announces. “And I’m to use my interrogation skills to find out where you’ve been. She’s not having any of that.”

Lewis’ look of amusement takes on a harder edge. “You can try if you like. I’ll tell you now it won’t be happening.”

James stares at him, realising for the first time that Lewis’ evasions have not been something for James to work through, until they're both further into the evening and the beer. Lewis had delivered that like an unwavering edict. He’s more than made up his mind. James had been lulled into enjoying the little snippets he’d been given so far, to start piecing together Lewis’ different life, and he’d failed to remember that this could have been a far worse ordeal than Lewis has been making out. Lewis catches the look and shakes his head.

“Nothing happened. Mostly, it was beyond tedious. Here’s a tip for you if you ever find yourself in the same situation: don’t ever agree to be a retired accountant. You won’t be able to go near your local, come April. Folk will keep asking you about their tax return. I had to cultivate a reputation for grumpiness.”

“Cultivate, sir?” James asks, playing for time. Because although there’s been no visible change in Lewis’ posture, James can feel the tension in the set of Lewis’ shoulders against his. “Surely not. And my suits are far too good for me to be an accountant.”

“Your suits are far too good for you to be a policeman, and that’s never hindered you. And you’d probably just do their tax returns, wouldn’t you?”

James would never have interacted sufficiently with anyone in this local to get asked any such thing, but he stays quiet about that. “You’re really not going to tell me?” It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d never get to find out the details of the case. That Lewis wouldn’t, in the end, brief him as his sergeant, in a partners’ way. And in doing so, let James privately get a grasp on where he’d been when he’d vanished into that void.

Lewis’ head is quite close when he turns to look fully at James, but his look is closed. “I’m not having you dragged into this.”

It wouldn’t be dragging, James thinks, if someone comes willingly, picking up the pace, falling into step. He’s never needed dragging after Lewis.

“Innocent will get to know,” he points out, frowning back at Lewis, in face of that look he can’t see into.

“No doubt. And whatever she gets to know, I doubt she’ll be sharing it with you.”

Well. That’s certainly true. More than Lewis thinks.

“I’ll still find out all about it when it comes to court, though,” he says, confused.

“Good luck with that one.”

“It’s not going to court? After all that? You went and it’s not even—”

Lewis looks at him, the sharper edges of his anger fading already at that. “It’s not. Because last night someone very much did for our very much prime suspect. One of his own lot.”

“You went for nothing?—I don’t mean for nothing, I mean, to keep you safe—”

“I didn’t go to keep me safe. It made a big difference to the family, who’d felt let down left, right and centre by everyone. As if their son’s life hadn’t mattered a damn amongst all the corruption and the power politics. It made a difference to them that I’d go that far to make sure they got their testimony, their day in court. After all these years.”

“They didn’t get that. Their day in court.”

“They felt,” says Lewis, briefly, “as things went in the end, that they got some sort of justice. Maybe more than the courts were about to deliver.”

There’s a silence after that. James is still made restless by something in that shut-down look of Lewis’. He sends a quick glance sideways. “Just so we’re on the same page then, sir. Earlier, when you said we should have a catch-up, what you meant was one where I fill you in on what’s been happening and in return you don’t tell me anything?”

“That’s the one,” says Lewis, satisfied. “Always said you were the cleverest sergeant I’ve ever had. Christ,” he mutters, “that certainly turned out to be true.”

“I’ve a distinct feeling you’re damning me with faint praise there, sir.”

Lewis gives a laugh that lacks any humour. It must be—odd for him. It would be so much more straightforward to have James’ freely righteous anger towards Ali. He’d seen Lewis shaken by the betrayal of discovering who it was that she’d turned into after he’d left his partnership with her. Now Lewis’ worst suspicions, that had seen him embark on that painstaking review of his cases with her, must have been confirmed; he’s presumably discovered that this was who she’d been all along. And having to rewrite history in his head, about someone he’d trusted, would hit Lewis particularly hard. He’s gazing out the window now, past James and this evening and back to—it suddenly seems vital to keep him anchored here.

“So Inspector Morse really had nothing to do with it?” James says.

“Morse?” Lewis asks, his attention caught, as always. “No. No, all this would’ve started after his time. Strange, he was the Chief Super then, he wasn’t doing so well in his last few months in the post. Finally gave in and took ill-health retirement soon after I—left for the BVI.”

And James sees. It was how he’d almost-sensed from those files. Whatever had happened on this case, originally, it had been allocated to Lewis in that space when he’d been lost. Lost to the world and uncaring what it did to itself. Or to him. He knows that Lewis attributes that to his drinking. James thinks it’s all of a piece with him being lost in the shockwaves. Stunned by the easy certainties of his world upended. His life and his work collided after all, and an eviscerating loss that no-one could do anything about.

And Ali had maybe not deliberately taken advantage, but she’d certainly managed to slip things through the gaps her superiors’ struggles had left. James bites back his own swelling anger and focuses instead on Lewis who is looking—this is what Lewis is trying to close off, to get distance from again, that time he’s now had to relive. James hasn’t got the heart to probe further.

He settles back on the couch and lets his shoulder knock lightly against his inspector’s. “Well, you may say that, sir,” he says darkly. “But nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to convince Laura that this wasn’t all somehow Inspector Morse’s fault. Quite possibly from beyond the grave.”

Lewis’ face opens in genuine enjoyment. “I can imagine.”

“Why does she get so…”

Half of him listens to Lewis outlining something about instant coffee and something about a mouse. If James looks bemused by the end of it, that has to be the appropriate response.

“Did you say you’d taken a fall recently?” Lewis says, nearly catching him off guard.

“No. No I didn't say that at all.”

“Must have been Laura,” says Lewis. He’s fooling no-one. “And you needn’t think I haven’t noticed she’s finally moved beyond Doctor Hobson. I don’t know what’s brought on this lack of formal etiquette, but you can stop with the sirs now too, you know. Any time you want.”

“I really can’t. It’s the novelty. I haven’t been able to ‘Sir’ anyone for months.”

“What did you do, get yourself promoted?”

“Managed to dodge that particular bullet.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Lewis says, wryly. “Is it call-me-Alan you’ve been assigned to then? All informal and suchlike? What about Grainger? He wouldn’t be going in for any of that lark. Don't you call them—no, I don't suppose you do.”

James glances at him, suspiciously. Because he also hasn’t mentioned anyone specific he’s been working with. “I just nod at them. And make deferential faces.”

“Deferential? You?”

“Well, I make faces,” James amends.

“Now, that, I can imagine. How's that work on the phone?”

“With difficulty.” Which rather summed the whole thing up. “Never thought I’d say this, sir, but it’ll be a relief to be making your overly-milky, oversweetened tea again.”

Lewis shoots him a look. “And you've got yourself allocated a project on your own, have you?” he says mildly, putting it all tidily together.

“God, how long were you and Laura on the phone for? It only seemed like five minutes.”

“She’s a concise woman. Gets to the point.”

“Doesn’t she just.” James is already going to be coming in from work tomorrow evening to an empty flat with no Monty. He’d be feeling sore at all his allies deserting him if it wasn’t for that text in his pocket from Laura. And the feeling that he can trust her with the important things about the time when Lewis was gone.

“So first, she said to put you on, so she could ask you how your review went. And then she stopped herself and said, actually, that no longer mattered. What did she mean?”

“She meant you’ve saved me from a fate worse than Peterson.”

“That sounds serious. What’s that when it’s at home?”

“Peterson plus Grainger in rotation fulltime again. When Innocent said about your timing. That’s probably what she meant.”

Lewis frowns at his glass. "Grainger is a decent bloke. Decent copper."

James suppresses a sigh. "I know."

“Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, are you?” But he’s still gazing into the glass.

“Sir?”

Lewis turns back to look at him. His eyes are kind. So kind that James is lost; stilled and held in that look. He breathes easier in response to it. He breathes more deeply. Which is why it takes him a moment to feel the blow that Lewis is trying to blanket him from.

“I’m done, lad.”

“What?”

“Me and the job. I’m done with it now.”

“No,” says James, sitting upright in a hurry. Too fast. He ignores the dizziness.

“I had to do without it, and I didn’t miss the job. I got used to being without that.”

“You were only,” says James—very carefully, because the  _only_  feels like such a lie—“only gone eight months.”

And only back two minutes, and the whole idea of him being back has been gently shattered into little pieces. Like wrapping a china cup in brown paper, and then smashing it with a hammer. But Lewis is looking at him, anxious, and ready to handle the pieces, however likely he is to get stabbed by a random shard; and James has no right to argue. It wasn’t Lewis’ choice to have James stand in place and wait. Beermat or not.

He takes a breath that doesn’t work so well now, and he tries to backtrack. “I suppose,” he says, doing his best, “you’ve had a trial run. Although Laura figured you’d be trying to solve the case. And your own disappearance while you were at it.”

“She wasn’t entirely right about that,” says Lewis, slowly. “It was a pretty different set-up. I wasn’t at the beck and call of other folk’s tragedies anymore. I had to start living a life apart from that. No choice in the matter.”

Maybe, James thinks, given how well he looks, that’s been a good thing for him. It’s probably the first time Lewis has stopped doing the job since he signed up.

“And you’ve only gone and swapped our nice office for the mop cupboard, anyway.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s lost his partner properly now. They’re hardly about to make Lewis work a notice period in these circumstances. It’s very hard to adjust the picture and get it properly into focus. James is never going to stand at Lewis’ shoulder again, being his unquestioning back-up. Never be his sergeant again. Never be—well, his, again. He sees the narrowing road ahead; meet-ups for the occasional pint, dwindling. And Lewis’ probable move to Manchester. He hasn’t really come back, after all. Not to Oxford. Not to the job. It makes James wonder if Innocent had guessed that this could happen. With her pushing James to move on up the ranks now. Lewis has adapted while he’s been away, and he’s already moved on. Being away has let him get a new perspective on more than his relationship with Laura. James is the only one who hadn’t seen any of this coming and had the sense to move forward himself. He’d needed to be in exactly the same place so Lewis could come back to it. But Lewis doesn’t need that from him either.

“You’re really not coming back,” he says aloud, realising it. And then, because it is only fair, “Innocent is going to be really sorry,” he says, and means it.

“No-one to keep you in line, eh?”

“That’s not just it.” Although Lewis’ eyes are shaded with concern still, and it’s too late now to pretend that the job is still okay for James. Maybe Innocent will rethink his project. Now that Lewis is no longer a missing person, highlighting voids everywhere. James doesn’t think so. “She kept your position open, you know. Even though I think it was a struggle for her.”

Lewis grimaces softly. “It will leave a vacancy. You could always—”

“Don’t,” says James, without rancour.

“Alright,” says Lewis, pacifying, the anxiety not lifting from his eyes. “Just—don't do anything in a rush, would you? Don't go anywhere just yet.”

They seem to hit a pause after that. James settles back and makes a convincing attempt at enjoying the rest of his beer. When he next remembers to take in what’s been happening on the screen they’re supposed to be watching, the highlights have ended, and the news is on. It is late. He can tell without checking the time. It’s become as dark outside as a July night gets, with the darkness holding no real heft to it, but only the television flickering its light over them in here. And although the rain from earlier has let up at last, that slight chill has descended again. His head is buzzing far more than the beers could account for.

Lewis seems to see something of this. “Why don’t you get some sleep? Unless you’ve commandeered my spare room as a wine cellar. Or an overflow lending library.”

James stands to follow him into the kitchen. “I was hoping for a recording studio, sir.”

“You’ve got Monty’s hair on your shirt,” says Lewis, spotting it as he turns the overhead light on, and he reaches to pluck it from James’ arm, as James puts the beer bottles down beside the sink.

“Your cat moults like a budgie.”

“He seems to spend more time draped on you than he ever did on me,” says Lewis, setting his beer glass down beside the bottles.

And there he is. Back. And standing right here in his kitchen. Doing something so domestic and familiar and ordinary. So real and whole and unscathed.

James tugs at his arm. Lewis half-turns, surprised, but moving toward him.

It’s unexpected and awkward and more of a pat on the shoulder than an embrace. But somewhere in the midst of that clumsily surprised rearranging of bodies before minds, there’s James, with nothing left to lose now, because this is the ending, and this is permissible as a goodbye. Lewis has come back only to leave again, but right now he’s briefly solid against James’s shoulder, and James’ chest is rising and falling without constraint, breathing, for just a vanishing moment, Lewis’ own warm scent.

There’s a brief pat to the back of James’ neck that could be mistaken for a clasp in another time or place than his boss’ kitchen, on a night like tonight, and then James straightens up.

“It's good to have you back,” he says.

“Aye. Well. I won’t say it’s not good to be back.” Lewis looks gruffly pleased and embarrassed.

No, he’s not leaving again. Because, yes, he’s not coming back to the job. But this time, James will know he’s safe. And if that was the deal the devil had offered, James would do it all again in a heartbeat. And, all things considered, not even watch out for the tree roots.

=

It’s not like anyone physically needs a cat to get to sleep, James tells himself, an hour later, lying in the dark. That would be a biological impossibility. But Monty, the traitor, has presumably found his way right back home to Lewis’ bed.

It’s been an hour of slowly stretching quiet. Except this is the second time he’s heard Lewis up and about. He’s roaming wakeful, and it’s a welcome interruption to James’ thoughts. The quiet hasn’t helped at all. James hasn’t been able to shake the conviction that he’s alone here again and if he sleeps, he’ll wake, to find today has only been a dream, and he’ll be helplessly back before the moment when Lewis had first taken hold of his shoulder. Reclaiming him.

He shuffles down a bit and clasps his hands behind his head, staring at the spread of street light leaking across the ceiling. One curtain has slipped its moorings at a corner. James had always meant to have a look at it in the morning. It’s another thing that turns out not to matter.

He is, he tells himself, turning over again, and giving the restraining sheet a kick for good measure, free now. Of all the promises he’s had to keep. He’s no longer in limbo. Lewis is moving on, and James is free. Free to actually become an inspector. Or to leave the job, to do—well, he’s free, that’s the important point. Whatever the constriction still in his chest says.

He’s not getting to sleep like this.

He turns over onto his back again. The familiar sound drifts in, of Lewis opening a kitchen cupboard. He never brings a glass of water with him and always goes to get one. And he doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to go back to bed. Getting reaquainted with his flat on his own time now, James supposes. But in the comfort of those half-heard background noises, undeniable evidence of his presence close by, James finds that sleep might be a possibilty after all.

Until an overly-sharp sound intrudes, from down the hall, of Lewis setting his glass down too hard, followed by an odd sputtering cough. And the quick tread of footsteps approaches the bedroom door. James only has time to half-raise his head off the pillow, and himself up on his elbows, before there’s a proper policeman’s knock, making him jump.

“Hathaway,” comes Lewis’ voice, fiercely indignant, “what the  _bloody hell_  have you done to the Talisker?”

James abandons his attempt at sitting up and rolls over to muffle the release of his laughter in his pillow.

=

James makes tea. Then he drops down on the couch beside Lewis, stretching out his legs. He doesn’t mind the lack of whisky. Lewis, also in pyjama trousers and t-shirt, also a little bed-rumpled, is right beside him again. Lewis is not looking very enamoured with the substitution. “Laura owes me a bottle of Talisker,” he says darkly.

James regards the ceiling. It regards him back, blandly admonishing. It had been witness to this little exchange, back in January. “Ah,” he says, turning back to Lewis, who has rested his head against the back of the couch at an angle, so he’s watching James, ruefully. “That could be problematic, sir. I seem to have agreed that we’d provide her with one instead.”

“Let me get this straight. She drinks half our Talisker, she ruins the rest, and she gets you to agree we’re giving her another bottle?”

“For Christmas. And a single refinery. She really likes this one.”

“I’m sure she does,” Lewis says, in protest. He gives the Talisker, standing squarely on the coffee table in front of them, another accusing look. Either Laura had sorely underestimated Lewis’ palate, or else she’d decided she didn’t much care and enjoyed much further imbibing before she’d bothered to doctor it. James knows which one he’d put his money on. “Maybe she’d settle for a miniature,” Lewis decides. “One of those little airplane bottles.”

“I really wouldn't advise that, sir,” says James, alarmed at the mere prospect. “It’s somehow become symbolic of how much her work is valued. And possibly,” he adds, reflective, “that of the entire profession of pathology.”

“Oh, Lord. I see what this is. You've been insulting Laura. I knew it wasn’t safe to leave you on your own. That’s going to come back to haunt me too, you know, she blames me for not keeping you right.”

“It really wasn’t intentional. That time. And not anymore, anyway. She puts all the blame for my misdeamours firmly on my shoulders now.”

“Well, there’s something that’s come out of this then.” But Lewis looks warmly amused, and curious. He’s pleased, to an extent that only Lewis would be, that two of his people have made their own connection now, untrammelled by him. “We could let her have the angels' share,” he says, his eyes thoughtful. And then, at James’ look, “You don’t know that one? The portion of every cask that evaporates into the atmosphere while the whisky’s maturing.”

“Yes,” says James, charmed by the term. Although he’s far less sure it would distract Laura from the lack of actual whisky. He wonders where he’ll be, come Christmas. Wherever that is, he’s going to have a bottle of whisky sent to her.

“You’ll be getting me in trouble with her again, all the same, if she could see us now. She said she trusted I’d have more success than her getting you to eat more, sleep more, smoke less, and drink less. I seem to be having the opposite effect.”

“She’s pretty much ensured we’re drinking less,” James says, steering neatly around all this.

Lewis shakes his head. “I still can’t believe you let her do that to our hard-won Talisker.”

“You,” James says, pointedly, “were going to drink it without me.”

“Ah, I knew you were still awake. I could hear you fighting with the bed clothes. Resisting arrest, were they? I was going to come and get you in a bit. Just wanted a dram first, to settle my thoughts.”

“I think I’d sleep better out here,” James realises.

“D’you want to go home?”

James shakes his head.

“You’ve been having bother sleeping again, haven't you? This past while.”

He looks so kind when he's anxious. Even kinder than James had remembered. And sometime during that hour of quiet, a barrier has dropped. James sighs and buries his toes deeply into the carpet. There's something about being rescued from his own thoughts for this early hours reprieve. He’s taking it in, and storing it up, all of it; the slight chill of his bare feet, the heat of the mug in his hands, the warmth of having Lewis back.

Knowing that it’s the last time they’ll do this makes everything feel clearer and more vivid.  
  
“I kept having these dreams,” he tells Lewis. “These surrealist landscapes with the oddest things gone missing.”

Lewis grimaces at him. “You count yourself lucky, Sunshine. I kept dreaming I had a ghostly beetle whispering things in my ear. ”

James laughs.

Lewis’ eyes soften further, and his mouth twists in amusement, but he doesn’t join in. “If I’d had my way,” he says, awkwardly. “I wouldn’t have left the way it happened.”

The mug in James’ hand dips heavily, and he sets it down, over-carefully, before it can betray him. But Lewis is still watching him, so closely, right next to him as they both rest their heads against the back of his couch. James takes a breath. “Well,” he says, struggling, “to be fair, I left first.”

“How do you work that one out?”

“In the pub. You asked me to stay and—well, I left. I didn’t realise.”

Lewis absorbs this, and then there’s a decided clunk as his mug is returned to the coffee table too. “Hold on a minute. Nor did I. I had no idea what was going to happen.”

“You seemed like you wanted me to—stay, I mean.”

“Yes. But that wasn’t—James, have you been thinking— ”

“And earlier that day,” James pushes on, uphill. It hurts having this pulled out of him, like the skin has closed over a whole host of splinters in his efforts to heal, and Lewis’ probing is unearthing them now. “That morning, when the thing happened with Kemp and the knife. You were—odd—like you were having trouble dealing with something. Like you knew that something could be about to happen—”

Lewis’ face changes immediately. “I was having trouble. With you. With what you’d done. Because you’d taken a risk with your own safety.”

“But you made me promise. Like you knew you might not be around.”

“Because I needed you to promise that. I still do. All the more so when I know I won’t be out there with you now. And I was damn glad I had, as things turned out. At least I wasn't imagining you going off getting yourself hurt, without anyone to watch your back. And you’ve been thinking that was me letting you know that I might not be around? James, no. That wasn’t it. I couldn’t take you putting yourself in danger like that one more time.”

They turn out to be not so much splinters but whole trees with deep gnarly roots; ideas about himself planted early on and given ideal growth conditions by all that’s happened since. And the whole tangled pestilence of them is getting wrenched out by a simple slash and burn policy from Lewis. It’s like trying to revise history in his head. All the wretched guilt and anxiety of the past months. All the worst of the lonely ideas. He could have understood all that had happened much better if he’d been able to trust and believe in Lewis’ care for him.

Lewis, who is still focusing on him quite hard. The new lines and the familiar ones are all deepening as James’ evident struggle troubles him too. “Is this what you’ve been fretting about?” he asks, still pushing gently, but with his sharper instruments cotton-wool covered now, “You thought you’d left me alone in the pub and something I was trying to outrun had caught up with me? What is it, James?”

James shakes his head, hard, trying to get past the agitation deep within him. “I didn’t know,” he tells Lewis, swallowing down the emotion of it, “if you were okay.”

“You were meant to get what updates there were. I gave them a couple of conditions when I agreed to go.”

“You said I was to get updates?”

“I said they needed to tell Innocent to tell you straight what had happened. I knew you wouldn’t be brushed off. Did she not—”

“She did—the first morning,” says James, finally, overwhelmingly, seeing just how badly he’d shot himself in the foot that day. “But then she wouldn’t—I mean, after I told Laura…”

Lewis closes his eyes briefly, in a grimace, as he also sees how that had played out. “So that was the way it went. Bugger.”

It could have been avoided. Innocent would have honoured Lewis’ wishes, even against her better judgement, if James hadn’t sabotaged himself, going back to her office that morning, fighting against Lewis’ loss, and telling her what he’d done. It’s too much to take in. “Couldn’t you just, though,” James says, fighting now against the knowledge of how much of his pain has been unnecessary, all along, “have sent something here yourself. A blank letter even, like Inspector Morse that time, with his accidental postmark. Just something to let us know that you were okay.”

“I couldn’t have let you know a thing. You’d have been right up to your neck in it, quick as you like. Involving yourself and trying to make it go away. As it was, I was half-expecting to come out and find you leaning against the wall of those flats one morning, smoking. Or skulking in the bushes some night when I got back from the local. I thought it was you anytime there was so much as a lurker in the dark, with the glow of a cigarette end.” The kindness in his eyes pulls at James, offering him the joke.

His own failure hits James like a further blow to badly-healed flesh. “I tried,” he says shortly. But his expression must give him away. Because Lewis’ expression changes rapidly in return, and he straightens up in a hurry, his head lifting so his gaze captures James’, which is trying to evade him now.

“There now. I knew you would’ve. Same as I’d’ve tried for you, okay? Just to know where you were, even. But you know you couldn’t have done a thing. It was a bad business all round. But I wouldn’t have had you mixed up in this for the world. Not you.”

James nods to acknowledge this, but he hasn’t got the words to seem convinced. None of it seems tangible now. He’s having trouble staying on the couch. In the flat.

Lewis looks at him and tries a different tack.

“James, no-one saw this coming. Get that idea out of your head for starters, would you? I didn’t. I paid the one who approached me no heed when he first came in. He just looked like a posh bloke in a bar. And you know that pub’s been getting posher by the week. First I knew of it, there was a pint glass sliding onto the table in front of me, and one of them was slipping into your seat. Thought for a moment you’d changed your mind about skipping practice and—ah, James, no—” as James hears a tortured noise break from his throat. “It was all civilised. Bloody bizarre, all the same, but civilised. First thing he said was: was this seat taken. Then he sits down and starts to talk, and it all moved fast from there—I needed to go with them. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were there or not. They’d still have come and said. And I’d still have gone.”

“I didn’t—” James starts to explain. But he hasn’t got the breath for words. It’s too much now. His breathing is becoming erratic with the stress of it. He drops his head back, so he’s no longer looking at Lewis, but finds that's not enough. Lewis reaches for his arm as he goes to get up.

“Come back here to me. Settle down now. Come on. With me, Sergeant.”

His voice has something husky to it, which makes James swallow. He collapses back against the couch.

“Let me—will you let me, James?”

James nods.

Lewis tugs him over, so James is half-resting against his warm side. Then he settles an arm along the back of the couch behind him, so James is roughly enclosed. “Here now,” he murmurs. “What have you been doing to yourself.” He doesn’t seem to need an answer.

“When I came back this afternoon,” he says, and it’s his comfortable storytelling voice, but James can feel the undertow of anxiety, pulling at him too, “the bloke who dropped me back said it’d been an experience having me. I said I’d noticed he’d forgotten to say pleasure. Then he offered to drop me back at the pub. Not a natural comedian that one. First joke I’d heard him make. ‘Like we promised,” he says. ‘All part of the service.’ And I remembered they had. ‘Have you right back here for a second pint when this is all over,’ they’d said on the evening I went with them. ‘Is someone going to tell my sergeant that?’ I’d found myself asking. They didn’t answer that one. But when I had to turn out my pockets to them, to give up my wallet and phone, I looked at the beermat, and I thought you’d—well, never mind what I thought. They did give it to you?”

“Yes,” James says. He’s being quietened very effectively, either by Lewis’ voice or his words. Or by the enviably steady rise and fall of Lewis’ ribcage, right against his. They could be sitting crammed together on a pub bench again. “Why did you bring it?”

“Damned if I know,” says Lewis. “I must’ve shoved it in my pocket. You’d just gone out the door, heading off with your guitar, and it didn’t feel right. I knew without thinking this would hit you hard. That you’d need to know how it was.”

“It was a really good idea,” James says.

He lets his head drop back, in an effort to get the air in, and he finds Lewis’ shoulder right there, waiting. He can’t help himself. He turns and buries his head in the crook of Lewis’ neck, and he finds something else there he hadn't known was missing, some vital element in the air he breathes that the periodic table doesn’t cover. In those ragged, stolen breaths he learns that inhaling the scent of Robbie Lewis is softer and easier than pure air.

Before he can bring himself to move, Lewis’ hand comes up to cup the top of his head with a hard grip.

“This from your fall?” comes his voice.

James makes a noise of assent into his shoulder, and Lewis’ thumb glances momentarily against the small welt. Then a finger, one of his broad, blunt fingertips, brushes it again, and moves on, stroking slowly, rhythmic as an evening rower near the end of the day.

Laura had been right, letting his hair grow in had hidden the scar from sight. But not from Lewis’ gentle touch, which threatens to shatter all that’s left of James’ fragile, punctured, carapace.

“So you hit your head,” Lewis says, brusque.

James makes a noise of agreement.

“And you hurt your chest.”

James goes to shake his head and discovers he can barely move it against Lewis’ hand. “No.”

“Why d’you keep pressing it then?” Lewis asks. And his hand releases its hold and slips down the side of James’s face, over his collarbone, and comes to rest, splayed lightly against James’ chest. “Why d’you keep doing that?”

“Just helps.”

“Here?”

James nods mutely, now his head is free to respond automatically to Lewis.

“Or more like—here?” Lewis is in no hurry, shifting the warmth.

“I—down a little bit.”

“Here.” Lewis forms a fist and taps gently.

“Yes,” James admits. “Yes.”

“How’s the weight of your heart then?” Lewis asks. And his voice still sounds roughly torn, as if coming from somewhere within a deeper part of him. “These days?”

James draws a last, fortifying breath. And raises his head to let Lewis’ waiting gaze look straight into him, just as it's always seemed to want to. “You should know,” he says. “You took it with you when you left.”

And somehow, outside, the sun must have come up impossibly early, and battled its way clear, unnoticed, of the clouds. Because when Lewis reaches for him, and kisses him, everything becomes spilling molten light.

=

During the long months when Lewis was gone, James had examined the beermat from every angle and, he’d thought, in all possible lights, lying flat on his back on his couch in heavy-headed musings. Until the lines that Lewis had scored into it had started to blur and lose perspective.

When he’d felt himself grow drowsily muddled and the urge to pet a sleeping cat too strong, he must have used the beermat as a coaster on more than one occasion. Because the rings of his whisky glass had been added to the ones Lewis’ pint glass had left in the pub. Measuring out the time that Lewis was missing like the growth rings of a tree.

Maybe, James thinks muzzily, when he stirs during the remaining hours of that first very early morning, only to find himself still held on the couch by a sleeping Lewis, the beermat hadn’t been an Eteocypriot inscription, after all, incomprehensible through the ages. Maybe it had been a Rosetta Stone. A way to translate the things that he and Lewis don’t say, under the more mundane things they do. Because Lewis’ hold is as protectively heavy as if James was the one who’d gone missing on him.

When he finally wakes properly, James shifts and becomes aware of the bulwark of Lewis’ shoulder, still taking the weight of all of James’ sleepy thoughts.

“Sir,” he whispers.

“Dear God,” mutters Lewis. “What the hell time is it? Why aren’t we in a bed?” But his hold only tightens as he wakes. James kisses him again, but only briefly, to let him grumble some more. Because he feels like he could happily wake to the sound of Lewis grumbling about the fact of morning every remaining morning of his life.

It’s when he tries to detach from Lewis, to think about going in to work, that things start to feel wrong.

“Take the day, why don’t you?” Lewis says, watching from the couch, as James, still in pyjamas, tries to make coffee.

“You don’t think Innocent would find it pretty coincidental if I went on unplanned leave this morning?”

“Circumstantial evidence,” says Lewis. “At best.”

James looks at him. He’s pushing forward helplessly, and Lewis, his eyes not leaving him for an instant, is planting a boulder of firm kindness right in his quietly agitated path. James can’t even think straight to plan a route to climb over it.

And Lewis is undeterred. “So she’ll think we spent the evening in the pub and you’re the worse for wear,” he acknowledges. “But she’ll be hoping I’ve talked some sense into you in the process. And from the sounds of what you’ve not been saying; she may think you’re owed the leave.”

“She might think I’m busy giving due consideration to this inspector’s post.”

“She drives a hard bargin. You have to go through OSPRE these days just to get a Friday off?”

“No, she said to—” James stops, with his hand on the top of the plunger, looking down at the cafetiere, coffee unplunged. Then he turns his head slowly to look at Lewis instead. “Maybe I will.” The idea is finally opening up. There seems little point staying at sergeant level now. There’s just no need.

Lewis stares at him. “Oh, she’ll love this. You resist and evade her, all this time, and then the moment I turn up again, retired—”

“God, she really _will_  think you’ve talked some sense into me,” James says, chagrined, and already seeing exactly how this is going to go. Innocent is going to be smilingly, wholly, satisfied and think all her own instincts proved correct. “You’ll get all the credit for me finally coming round to her way of thinking.”

Lewis shakes his head. His eyes, James sees, are very pleased.

“Probably only fair to credit you,” James tells him, “when she thinks it’s your doing I’ve been ruined for being anyone else’s sergeant.”

“How’s that one my fault?”

“Your lacksadaisical attitude towards rank for a start.”

“I’d forgotten I had one of those. It’s enough to make a man nostalgic. Look—take the day.” Lewis gets up to come over. “James,” he says. He puts out a hand to touch James’ face briefly. James stills. “Stay here. I know, in the circumstances, I’ve got little right to say it. But stay will you?” And he grips James’ arm, his fingers sliding up under the sleeve of the t-shirt, a proprietary gesture that draws James unresistingly closer. “D’you know I wasn’t sure you’d be here when I got back? Once I got a bit of distance from it, I could see you not sticking with the job.”

“But I had promises to keep,” James tells him.

“I know that one.”

James glances out, over Lewis’ shoulder, at the early morning garden. “D’you know when Frost wrote it? The woods filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year? At the height of summer, just as the sun came up. He’d been up all night and said it was like he was having a hallucination.”

Lewis gives him a speaking look.

“I’m not that tired.” It’s true. He’s not tired. He’s aeons past tired. Tired is months back on the road. He’s at stultifyingly, stumblingly exhausted.

He’s also running out of tape, unspooled by the look in Lewis’ eyes. It’s the relief of his thoughts quietening down. All the anxious noise over where Lewis is, if he’s safe, if he’ll return at all, is muted when Lewis stands in his kitchen in the morning quiet, their bare feet on the cool tiles, and keeps hold of James’ arm, and looks at him. Lewis looks at him and all the places to hide seem to vanish away.

“Do you want to go in to work?” Lewis asks. James doesn’t. He tips forward onto Lewis’ chest instead and feels Lewis’ arms come round him.

Come to think of it, he could just go back to sleep right here. It’s incredibly comfortable.

“A lot to get your head around, isn’t it?” he hears Lewis say, gruff. Lewis’ voice seems to come straight from his chest, that’s what it is. “All of this since yesterday.”

“It was the revelation that you think you can cook, now, sir,” James says, into Lewis’ warm, worn t-shirt. “It is a bit much.”

“It’s not last night that was too much for you?”

James lifts his head immediately. “No,” he says. “No.” He catches a glimpse of something troubling, deep in Lewis’ gaze, and kisses him to vanquish it. He makes it as convincing as he can and counts it a success when Lewis pulls away, flushed, one corner of his lovely mouth denting.

“Let’s try that again then,” Lewis suggests. “Waking up and you not diving off.”

“We’d have to go to sleep again first.”

“Now you’re getting the idea.”

“We just woke up.” He’s unsure why he’s still arguing except that he’s missed winding Lewis up so very much.

“You call that a night’s sleep? We’re in worse trouble here than I thought. Come on. Let’s be having you. You’d be no use to neither man nor beast, the state you’re in this morning.”

“I need to call in then.” And put his excuses in rather more conventional terms than that to the desk.

When this has been accomplished, and he heads into Lewis’ bedroom, he finds Lewis already there, waiting. As, James sees, is Monty. “You’ve been teaching my cat bad habits,” Lewis says, getting in first. “He’s going to want to sleep in here from now on, you know.”

James gets a knowing eyebrow hoisted at him. “That’s my side,” he says.

“You have a side in my bed…” He pulls James down. “You’ll sleep where I put you. Get over here.”

James tugs off his t-shirt before he obeys, to pull the pleasure of the coolness of the duvet up over bare skin. Then he moves over, right over against Lewis’ side, his cheek on the wiry-rough hair of Lewis’ chest, one of his legs twining its way in, so his calf is pressed inside one of Lewis’.

“What’s this now,” Lewis grumbles, gratified. “Trying to pinion me to the bed?” God, yes. James stretches his thighs deliciously, enjoying the pressure of a solid human against him, and lets his feet briefly stick out the bottom of the duvet. Lewis is heavy and pliable, all of him yielding-firm under James, as he settles back down, kissing the very Lewis-tasting hollow he finds between Lewis’ collarbones. Lewis’ bare arm come up to rest across his back. James lets his body relax against him, in the knowledge Lewis can take it, warm flesh against warm flesh.

“You’re like a boulder,” he tells Lewis, remembering his thoughts in the kitchen. “A warm, yielding boulder.” That’s successfully planted itself right in the way of James’ thoughts and is letting the worst waves of them swirl and eddy away, diluted. So that James can have this instead, this utter delight of having his mind overwhelmed, with only the longing, and pleasure, and restless heavy arousal left.

“I don’t know what sort of soft southern boulders they had in your rock climbing days,” Lewis says, dubious. “But alright. I suppose I’ve been called worse.”

The sun has followed them in here. It’s lying across the bed, and weighing James in place, pressing him gently downwards and turning his limbs heavy. He lets the quiet heat of it and the feel of Lewis beneath him do their work, the warmth steeping into him and covering him, a gently rising tide, until he begins to feel it spreading to fill all the spaces Lewis’ absence has carved out within him.

Maybe, he thinks, they could stay like this, as shifts of light gradually give way to one another, like the changing seasons Lewis has missed, and been missing for, this year in Oxford. Maybe they could create their own sort of limbo.

Lewis must feel something of it too. “The furthest we’re going from this place this weekend is the pub,” he says.

“But I’m never leaving you sitting by yourself at a pub table again. Not even to go to the bar.”

“Is this your way of telling me it’s always going to be my round?”

“ And that we’ll need to sit outside year-round.”

“Lightning doesn’t strike twice, James.”

“Tell that to Laura’s Franco. When he’s trying to buy her dinner.”

“Come again?” Lewis shifts his head to look at him and considers him a moment. “Laura said she was afraid you were disappearing on her too. Right in front of her eyes.”

James thinks about this. “Did you tell her you’re retiring?” he asks.

“When we were ending the call. She said she’d see me over the next dead body, if not before. I said she might have to make that a pint now. She went quiet for a bit and then said for heavens sake to break that to you gently.”

James sighs.

Lewis shifts his arm, letting his hand travel down to James’ hip. “And I didn’t finish telling you last night—”

“We were interrupted,” James says, gravely, to enjoy the look that crosses Lewis’ face.

Lewis shakes his head. “When I left the pub with them that evening, to go out to their car, I looked down the street and caught a glimpse, I thought, of someone with his back to me, walking away; of a blond head higher than everyone else’s, with maybe the strap of a guitar case. It can’t have been you, you’d have been halfway to your rehearsal by then, it was fanciful. And I knew that if it was you, then you’d have thrown a spanner in the works of it all pretty damn fast if you’d turned around. So it was for the best you didn’t turn around. But it kept me going. That picture of you that mightn’t have been you at all. Like a painting. Daft really. My sauntering minstrel in the sunshine.”

James stays quiet for some time, trying to let the carved out spaces within him absorb this too. Lewis leaves his arm around him, and it presses, gentle unquestioning pressure against him.

“Hush now,” Lewis mumbles at him after a bit, in the quiet. “Let a bloke get some sleep.”

James kisses him in response, not quite ready for Lewis to fall asleep yet. There’s an arm curling over James’ waist, and a broad hand spanning his hip. He’s so unused to it. The groundswell of relief threatens to wash him right out to sea, adrift and unreachable, so the deepest currents can have their way with him after all. But Lewis’ arm tightens around him, anchoring him back here in response. Lewis has him held in a lifesaving hold designed for tugging drowning men safely back to shore.

James will never remember much more of that first morning after that. He’ll only recall giving in, held so firmly in Lewis’ grasp that it turns out slipping quietly below the surface never was a possibility after all.

_End._

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter One: Thus far, James is quoting Dorothy Parker and J.M Barrie. James wishes to reserve the right to add extensively to this list as things proceed.
> 
> Chapter Two: James is thinking of 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost and 'J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement' by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 
> 
> He tries Monty with Henry V and Macbeth.
> 
> Chapter Three:  
> Laura quotes from 'The Scotsman’s Return from Abroad' by R.L Stevenson and 'To A Louse' by Robert Burns.  
> James and Laura are quoting more of the Frost poem, above, and also from 'Keen, Fitful Gusts are Whisp’ring Here and There' by John Keats:
> 
> Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there  
> Among the bushes half leafless, and dry;  
> The stars look very cold about the sky,  
> And I have many miles on foot to fare.  
> Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,  
> Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,  
> Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,  
> Or of the distance from home’s pleasant lair:  
> For I am brimfull of the friendliness  
> That in a little cottage I have found;  
> Of fair-hair’d Milton’s eloquent distress,  
> And all his love for gentle Lycid drown’d;  
> Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,  
> And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown’d.
> 
> Chapter Four:  
> James is thinking of the poem 'Memory of My Father' by Patrick Kavanagh
> 
> Chapter Five:  
> James and Laura are arguing over 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Sleep and Poetry', both John Keats, agreeing on 'We Grow Accustomed To The Dark' (Emily Dickinson), and taking liberties with 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,' also Emily Dickinson. 
> 
> James also quotes Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'.
> 
> Chapter Seven:  
> James has gone back to the Robert Frost.


End file.
